The Ragnarok Strain (20)
by Valxyri
Summary: An ancient peril from Asgard's past returns to threaten the lives of both Thor and Loki. can their friends find a solution in time? Novella length story with lots of pain and a little bit of humor. started this ages ago, ran out of steam, just picked it up again and fixed it, most ambitious story i've done yet!


It happened at the end of the third attack in two weeks. One moment Loki was facing down an alien invader, a former comrade in arms, his long leather coat fluttered in the dusty air, magical energy crackled in his palms. Then when no one was looking it struck, so fast and so suddenly that nobody saw the attack. He cried out, a broken sob of pain escaping his tightening throat, clutching at his chest and crumpling slowly towards the ground. Thor dove to catch him but only succeeded in holding his skull away from the pavement.

Slowly the avengers gathered around, the last scout had died in a fireball with one of Hawkeye's arrows in his throat.

Loki's mouth worked in a silent expression of pain for a moment before his pale eyes rolled back into his head and he fainted against his brother's body.

"His vitals are stable but I'm getting some wild energy spikes from him." Tony Stark sounded dumbfounded; he retracted the face mask on his suit. "It's like he's losing control of his magic." He looked up at Thor with a frown.

The Captain squinted into the sun, surveying the clear space which he had told the air ambulance to land. He was standing on the upturned undercarriage of a Metropolitan buss, frowning down the wide, empty avenue. Civilians were just beginning to stagger into the street; a car alarm went off as the thick cloud of dust settled. "I thought you hated that word?" He asked Tony.

"Don't have any better word for it, Cap."

Iron Man's armor glinted in the grey wash of ruin; he stooped low over Loki's shoulder. The chaos of what had only hours before been Fifth Avenue smoked and reeked around them.

"Loki?" Bruce was using his doctor voice, "Loki, can you open your eyes?" he was still shaky and pale in the wake of his transition back into human form, he had to squint to see well without his glasses and the dust settled on his bare shoulders.

"Can't he just shut it off?"

"You do not understand, Stark." Thor growled, his fingers were working furiously at the connections between the plates in his brother's body armor. "He does not wield his magic as one does a weapon; it _is_ him, drawn straight from the depths of his soul. It keeps him alive."

Loki was still wearing his armor, it seemed to always sparkle into place, immaculately clean and perfectly arranged and not even Thor, who understood the complexities of Asgardian battle dress better than anyone could figure out how to get it undone. Tony tried to cut through one of the shoulder fasteners with a laser from one of his gloves. Sparks erupted brilliant and white in his face, Loki did not stir.

The blade which had struck him down still rose stiffly from his chest, jammed between slats in his armor. It wasn't a big knife, maybe six inches, thrown from the hand of a Chitauri scout. A present for his betrayal. But Thor could not yet see the blackening of the veins around the wound, hadn't noticed the heat rising in his brother's skin or the stiffening of his neck muscles.

There had been three small scale raids since Loki had suddenly appeared in Tony's living room two weeks earlier, all leather and brass and flashing green eyes. No one knew where they were coming from, but their former enemy was able to pinpoint where they would appear every time. He wasn't trusted by any means but he had spoken at length about the mind control devices which these beings had created, and wooed Tony stark with the promise of alien technology and an intimate knowledge of their enemy's capabilities into letting him fight alongside them.

Clint and Natasha were far away on assignment, "Fucking in a yurt," Tony had suggested. So it was only the five of them and when the alarm had clanged that a new portal had opened up in the Upper East Side (exactly where Loki had warned it would) they had allowed him to fulfill the mechanical void left by their only sniper and their only really stealthy team member.

"I have no idea what I'm doing." Bruce admitted shakily. He was wearing only a pair of emergency boxers which Tony kept stashed in some cranny of his body armor. Despite his exposure he handled the pale Asgardian like an orphan in Mumbai.

One hand rested against the side of Loki's neck, monitoring the strange rhythm of his alien heart. Weeks ago he had glanced at the full body MRIs which the two Asgardians had allowed him to take, and the only real information he could immediately glean was _definitely not human. "_But he needs surgery to remove the knife without his lung collapsing."

There was a metallic clink and the laser in Tony's glove blew out with a puff of smoke, he swore, it had barely made a mark on the brassy metal.

Bruce reached one hand under the unconscious man's body; the leather ad fabric of his clothing was heavy and dark with blood.

Bruce looked earnestly up at Thor, "we need him to wake up to magic away his armor so I can get the bleeding under control."

Thor nodded and with surprising tenderness he leaned down, threading his fingers through his brother's dark hair, cupping his skull in one massive hand and speaking inaudibly into Loki's ear.

For a split second everyone present was enchanted by the surprising display of filial love. Then Loki's body jerked, his eyes flew open and he gasped for breath.

"Thor?" Loki whispered weakly. The effort of speech jarred the weapon and he grunted in agony. The wound throbbed with unnatural heat and he could feel cold sweat (or was it blood) running under his armor. He tossed his head into his brother's thigh, eyes shut tight, sipping weakly at the air.

_-Something is wrong, you aren't healing correctly, and we need to get to the wound. _Thor said to his brother in whispered Asgardian. Loki blinked at the fog through which his brother's face was swimming, a bright, Aryan blur of gold and tan.

-_you'll be alright, _he promised, removing his heavy red cape and covering Loki's lower body with it. The fallen prince blinked wearily, eyes a startling shade of green and his armor faded. He collapsed back into the blood wet asphalt with a pained grunt.

Loki's body held little of the godlike anatomy which his brother flaunted so effortlessly. He was a being of machination and fire and magic and lying exposed and wounded on the black top of Manhattan with all his spells and schemes stripped away he suddenly seemed incredibly vulnerable.

The wound was a mess, black poison poured from a shattered reservoir into his tautly opened skin, staining the blood vessels, and the gleaming layer of sub dermal fat a dark reddish brown.

"I can fly him back to Shield HQ," Tony frowned up at Bruce as he balled up bandages to press against Loki's blood stained chest.

The prince of Asgard screamed and thrashed under the shifting pressure, his fingers dug into Thor's wrist, "the medics are taking too long."

"You'd kill him," Doctor Banner stated plainly, "I don't know how close the knife is to his major thoracic artery. He could be dead in your arms by the time you got there."

Loki stared blankly past them sipping on desperate little gasps of air, his lips were purple. He tossed his head in discomfort and defiance and choked on the sudden thick fluid in his throat.

"Pull him up, get his head elevated."

"His blood pressure's spiking," Tony sounded tense, his suit was outfitted to monitor vital signs, human vital signs, Loki's never made any sense.

Thor dragged his brother into his armored chest, grabbing the red cloak to pull up with his body. Loki thrashed at the sudden jarring movement, throwing his head back to his brother's shoulder, squeezing his eyes shut.

"Pulse is at two twenty!" Bruce frowned down at Iron man's geometric features, then shifted his gaze up to Thor.

"He's fine." Thor smoothed back his brother's dark hair, he was whispering inaudibly into his ear, one big hand across his forehead. There was blood on Loki's mouth, his eyes held none of their usual gleam. He blinked up sadly past the skyscrapers at the fleeting golden sky, pink clouds hung fat against the indigo blanket of dusk, cut through with buildings which the Humans thought were impressive.

_-Why aren't I healing?_ He asked Thor in a desperate whisper, in their native tongue, gasping at wet sounding breath.

-_There is something on the knife._ Was that fear in Thor's voice? The world was going grey.

–_Loki!_

Loki opened his eyes feebly, he hadn't been aware of closing them. Bruce was very close, frowning in concentration as he held white gauze to Loki's bare chest. The stricken Asgardian blinked down at the doctor's hands, big and rough and tan and streaked with dark red blood.

The air was filled with the whine of engines as the shield medical team finally appeared in a dull grey Harrier with a friendly red cross on the side.

He was transfixed for a moment, frowning, he brought one hand to Bruce's wrist. Weak fingers grappled with the doctor's pulling away the gauze so that he could clearly see where the blade sank into his chest. He knitted his brow, breathing gingerly. Blood turned black with poison welled up to start fresh rivulets across his white stomach and Bruce pushed his hand away.

Loki grunted at the sudden renewed pressure, squeezing his eyes shut. Thor was holding his hands back by his head.

"No…" Loki protested weakly, his skinny wrists writhing in the confining grip.

-_it's fine you'll be fine, brother, just hold still._ But Loki was filled with sudden panic. His body arched and his legs thrashed under the red fabric.

"Get aw-y." he pushed at Thor weakly. A wave of feeble magic pushed ineffectively at Thor's body, tossing his hair in its wake.

-_I'm not going anywhere- _Thor insisted, clutching the pale hand. But Loki's eyes were wide and crazed by pain and by poison. Loki threw up one weak hand to grapple at his brother's armor.

The medics scrambled over the buckled tarmac with a backboard and serious expressions.

"Stay still," Bruce's big hand held Loki to the ground at his sternum, "you're only making it worse."

"I'm getting some kind of energy spike…" Tony warned.

-_GET AWAY FROM ME NOW!_ He screamed in Asgardian, which to the humans sounded terrifying, an unearthly command that echoed with the promise of Armageddon. He threw his hands back and Thor was thrown backwards by a magical force, Bruce and Tony were thrown onto their backsides and the medics went tumbling.

Loki curled reflexively around the wound, choking and gasping unto the pavement.

"Brother?" Thor sounded strangely young.

"You moron," Loki hissed, "It's Fenric toxin." His delicate hand clutched at the decorative hilt of the throwing knife and before Bruce could stop him he had torn it from where it invaded his body.

There was a sickening pop, and the wound bled heavily. He screamed and with the lexicons of a thousand worlds to choose from gasped, "Fuck!" into the Earth with a wet cough.

Loki's fingers were slick and red as they sought to cover the wound. He groaned piteously into the warm cement, one thrashing foot tugging down Thor's cape over his hip.

Thor stumbled back, covering his mouth with one hand, all color had drained from his cheeks and his blue eyes were wide with fear.

"Jesus Christ." Bruce breathed, grabbing at Loki's wrist. He pushed aside the Asgardian's hands to cover the wound but found only smooth skin streaked with red. He frowned in wonder as he touched, black veins still rising in a bruised circle around the baby soft skin where the knife had stuck a moment ago.

Tony crouched and picked up the knife, it didn't look like Chitauri workmanship.

"Loki?" Bruce looked up at the pale face but all light had gone out of his green eyes; he gasped at shallow breath through lips still stained red. "Loki if you can hear me I need a sign." Green eyes fluttered then closed. His whole frame slackened in a dead faint.

"We need to get him evac'd back to the tower stat!" the Captain ordered as he shepherded the medics towards where Loki lay.

"His pressure's dropping. What's ninety over forty three mean?" Tony asked thin air, "Thor?" he looked up but the Asgardian had vanished. "Shit!" he stepped back to let a petite woman with a yellow spine board get close to the fallen god.

"Don't," Bruce held back one of the EMT's wrists, he was holding a syringe. "No antibiotics, no painkillers, nothing. We have no idea how his system will react to them, just saline and O two."

A thick rope of blood stretched between the Liesmith's face and the pavement as he was tipped into the stretcher, guided by a dozen human hands. There was something crushingly mortal about the way his body fell helpless against gravity. The human hands held his neck straight, bound his hands close to his body, strapped down his ankles.

"Fly ahead with his vitals." Doctor Banner ordered Iron man, "The medical team is flying blind, they have to know everything."

"I'll have Jarvis bring up the three D body scans we took a year ago." They jogged alongside the gurney, Bruce looking flushed but thoroughly calm.

"Good, We'll need chest X-rays and make sure the tower theatre is prepped just in case he wasn't able to magic shut everything, And run a tox screen on that knife, if we know what the poison is we might be able to fight it."

"Yes doctor," Tony said with a sarcastic salute, he kicked off from the ground with a whirr of heat he streaked away between the smoke screened skyscrapers

Bruce touched one white hand as they scampered quickly towards the waiting aircraft, he took the clear IV bag from the small EMT as she fixed a greenish plastic mask over Loki's face. He turned back to watch the captain lope up the gang ramp.

Where the fuck was Thor?

* * *

**Chapter 2: Midnight on Asgard**

* * *

Golden nebulas swirled through with bursts of starlight and ribbons of cerise bent the light of the Asgardian sun into warm tones of eternal sunset. The opalescent arc of the unfinished Bifrost stretched out into darkness, still bare beams stood like skeletal fingers against the deep velvet backdrop of stars. Without the delicate filigree of the original gate house, it looked ruinous, embattled, this world was very old.

An ear splitting peal of thunder rent the sky above the spires and lights of the city of the Aesir. In a flash of light a figure tumbled in a practiced shoulder roll onto the shimmering rainbow bridge.

Sif stood shakily, unaccustomed to the discomfort of riding in on the first, foundational enchantments put down to repair the Bifrost. Her armor was clean and she sparkled in the starlight like a gemstone with an anti microbial force shield laid invisibly close to her skin.

Hiemdall watched her recover from above folded arms. Grim and glittering and impatient.

"What news from Odin's son? He berates me with cryptic messages, why has he not come himself?"

She stood stiffly, looking up at him with soft, dampened brown eyes. "He's contaminated."

Heimdal relaxed his arms slightly, "And Silvertoungue?"

"Gravely," her eyes caught in his for a moment, "gravely injured. I must to the palace."

"Make haste!" he pulled a lever which opened the shifting architecture of the doorway, lowering an elegantly engineered bridge to arch across open space. The city was busy and loud and full of color and light, the glory of the heavens, city of gods, heavenly metropolis of peace, Valhalla.

"The sun will go black, earth sink in the sea, heaven be stripped of its bright stars..."

* * *

Frygga sat alone in her bedchamber, a cold breeze blowing across her bare calves, moving one strand of hair across her cheek, so pale a shade of ashen blonde that no one could tell if it was actually white. The lights were low and her whole pale frame, shrouded in fine silk on the edge of her bed, was tense with affliction. She was illuminated by a broken projected image of her only natural born son.

She stopped the projection with a flick of her finger and started it again from the beginning.

They had fifteen seconds of corrupted footage. It faded in with a cackle to Thor's face, very close, speaking quickly in Asgardian. Rain poured over his features, dripping from his nose and from his hair. He seemed to drop in mid sentence.

"-oxin, seal off the planet, close the Bifrost, quarantine everyone who comes in. You cannot let this spread. You cannot let the virus get to Asgard! You cannot…" Thor was breathing heavily and spoke in a voice which reminded his mother poignantly of how he had sounded as a small child, "The sun will go black, earth sink in the sea, heaven be stripped of its bright stars..." he stopped, completely still, and for a moment the video was clear enough for her to see his left eye dilate very suddenly moments before he collapsed, and the video went on to record several minutes of blank white sky.

Frygga folded her arms around her body, worry like a spike of physical pain wracked her and she clawed at her forehead with elegant fingernails on aristocratic fingers, blinking desperately for want of her family.

Loki was safe, for now, she was sure of it, after all he had endured, and Thor was not ready (by his father's account) to rule so she left them to Midgard, where they could contain their damage on a cosmic scale. Loki was wearing a tracking device, part of the conditions of his release, and Thor was charged with making him repay his damage to the little world.

"One habitat for humanity building at a time." Tony Stark had said.  
And of course Odin, whom others called Allfather, and she only called beloved. Frygga smiled, touching her mouth. The sleep sometimes took him for years, and who then to rule Asgard? Her magic was not as old, nor as well seasoned as his. She had never sold her sense organs for the secrets of the cosmos, and the ravens liked to pick at her jewelry. But she was loved by the people, politically popular, and a competent and responsible leader. A queen.

A knock at the elegantly carved door signaled the return of the envoy she had sent.

Sif closed the door silently. She stood in the shadows for a moment before bowing and approaching the queen.

"What news of my children?" Frigg's voice caught in her throat.

Sif licked her lips; eyes scanning the distant horizon rather than settling on the face of the proud woman she was about to destroy.

"It's Fenric toxin." She said bluntly, "same as before. These, Chitauri, must have gotten the schematics for the nanovirus from Loki when he was under their control. He's still alive, but with the dose he got he shouldn't be…"

"And Thor?" Frygga choked.

"He's symptomatic," Sif couldn't help but take one frail hand in a gesture of comfort.

"So we have forty eight hours." She subconsciously rubbed the younger woman's knuckles with her thumb.

"Get Sigmund." The queen ordered, suddenly confident, eyes shining. "Take him to Earth."

"Who's Sigmund?" Sif asked.

A gleaming black raven fluttered down to stand splay toed on the stone railing, it was quickly followed by a second.

"He's the third best Magician in Asgard of course." Frygga said with turn if the head and a thoughtful smile.

The bird nods to its partner, "The sun will go black, earth sink in the sea, heaven be stripped of its bright stars..." it announces with a whistle. Thunder rolls in the distance. And the birds tip off into the night sky, an auger? But of what?

"The birds cry doom while their master sleeps away my waning years." Frygga snapped shut the windows, sealing the avian vermin to the stormy outer darkness. "You see, Loki was originally responsible for the creation of the virus, my husband was responsible for the discovery of an antidote after the first time it was released on this world. So many died." she bowed her head and fixed her eyes on the city far below her.

"But Odin sleeps and Loki lies struck down by the self same illness."

"Which is why you must take Sigmund. He helped my husband during the original outbreak, and it may be that Loki wakes yet." Frygga guided the younger woman towards the door.

"I doubt it…" Sif placed a hand on the door handle.

"The virus does one thing, it kills Aesir." The queen let one affectionate hand glide up and down Sif's armored shoulder.

"What do you mean?" Sif's eyes went from the Queen's hand to her soft features.

"Loki isn't my son by nature." She breathed in, "he's not even Aesir."

"So the poison might not affect him as much?"

"That's my husband's area, or by necessity, Sigmund's." She frowned, fear and grief overwhelming her again, "But Thor is dying. He must fabricate the antivirus in forty eight hours or…" her eyes softened and a peculiar vulnerability seeped into her features, "please."

"With all haste." Sif kissed the queen's ring chastely and disappeared out the door.

Frygga threaded her fingers amongst one another, grinding her teeth and turning slowly until she met the projected image of her son's frozen face on the wall next to the window which opened on the stars.

She breathed in the close darkness of her royal bedchamber and for a moment she remembered the long forgotten days of the plague. She had never felt so alone.

.

* * *

**Chapter 3: Chapter 3**

* * *

The elegant claw footed tub in Tony Stark's private lavatory seemed a strange sickbed. Doctor banner squinted up from where he leaned wearily against the smooth curl of porcelain at a suspended, translucent computer monitor; one hand held his patient's delicate wrist, the other pushed his glasses up his nose.

"So Amoxicillin's out." Bruce frowned wearily down at his patient. His fever had climbed steadily over the last six hours. No medication would stick or seemed to have the slightest effect; the only thing which seemed to help was being nearly submerged in cold water, very cold water.

Which was where he was now, propped up by a towel behind his head, strings of black hair pouring over the edge of the bathtub, cold water lapped at his pale chest with every shallow breath. The mark where the knife had struck him was black with bruising and dark twisting veins indicating the presence of poison in the blood. One gangly arm hung over the edge of the tub, attached to an IV port into which Bruce was injecting yet another dose of the antipyretic cocktail Tony and he had concocted two hours ago.

"He just won't absorb anything, we're trying to break down a brick wall with waterballons. His immune system is too damn smart for our medicine. And it's killing him." Bruce explained to Steve who was acting as nurse while Tony ran toxicology in his chemical and biological weapons lab.

Loki tossed his head weakly in a fevered dream, muttered something in a language which sounded like Wagner sung in Icelandic, and lapsed deeper into his fitful sleep.

"I guess they're alien all the way through," the Captain frowned at the computer monitor, a tangle of white and strange structures which one would never guess from Loki's external anatomy.

"I can't even begin to comprehend how his central nervous system works." Bruce said through his fingers, shaking his head. He had dressed upon their arrival, throwing on sweatpants and a lab coat while Loki was stable enough to be left without a constant medical eye.

"Good news or bad news?" Tony announced, appearing through a door on the far side of the computer display. He stepped through the beams of New York sunlight and down to the tiled floor.

"Do you have the test results" Bruce looked up eagerly.

"That's the good news."

"You know what it is?" Steve cocked an eyebrow.

"That's the bad news, it's a self replicating nano virus designed to deliver some form of neurotoxin." He turned the monitor towards him and with a flick of his fingers he brought up the image he had generated on the computer in his downstairs lab. "Freakishly advanced, and nothing like the rest of the Chitauri technology we've recovered, scans indicate that some of the micromechanics are made from the same alloy as our friend's armor."

"But that would mean…"

"It's Asgardian." Tony raised his eyebrows, everyone's eyes drifted to the unconscious alien in the bathtub.

"But…" The doctor began and at that moment Loki stirred, and Bruce fell to his side, "careful."

Loki's eyes drifted across the room, snagging for a delirious moment on Tony, glazed and dilated, they finally landed on the doctor, his head rolled to follow them, his mouth moved and his voice came out in a garbled slur, something which was clearly neither English nor Asgardian. He thrashed weakly, dampening Bruce's shirtfront, eyes focused on the ceiling, gasping in shallow, fearful breaths.

Steve caught one of Loki's hands and held it effortlessly to the soft white porcelain.

"I swear I'm not the mother." Loki muttered, before launching into what sounded like a one sided conversation with thin air. Steve frowned up at Bruce who shrugged and checked the computer again.

The vitals scanner registered his body temperature as ninety nine degrees, a trivial illness for a human, but his normal healthy body temperature hovered somewhere around ninety two to three. This had perplexed Bruce for weeks, not because he expected Asgardian physiology to mirror Human anatomy in any way other than the purely aesthetic, but because when he had stuck a thermometer in the mouth of an extremely fidgety and distracted Thor, it had come out at ninety eight point six.

Bruce scratched at the inside of his ear thoughtfully. The screen blinked, ninety eight point eight, and the doctor allowed himself the luxury of a hopeful smile.

"But he's a horse?" Loki chuckled boyishly, and then his voice changed deepening and vibrating the air, "The sun will go black, earth sink in the sea, heaven be stripped of its bright stars..."

"Silvertougue," Tony frowned, "right…"

"Burn the branches, hack the bole, drown the roots and freeze the soul, the serpent slithers round the mountains, strike the drums and seal the fountains." Loki's green eyes wandered blinking in lazy delirium up to the faces of the three men around the edge of the bath. Something his fevered mind interpreted in their faces seemed to frighten him. He rested his forehead against cool porcelain, clutching the lip of the tub and groaning in discomfort. Bruce was keenly aware of the quickening rhythm f his heart beat under his fingers.

Doctor Banner scrubbed at his face with one hand, he frowned at the MRI scan illuminated on the computer display and wondered why his patient didn't appear to have a hypothalamus.

"Silent tread the ground is shaking, round the roots the white wolf waking, branches braking, leaves are shaking, the world of men mine for the taking." He laughed maniacally into the side of the bathtub, one bony hand clutched at Bruce's shirt. Loki's eyes were dilated and bright with fever and doctor Banner was only a split second too late to catch all of his vomit in a bedpan.

"Let's get him out of the water," Bruce reached down between his patient's knobby ankles and pulled the plug on the tub, "give his body time to adjust, we have no idea how he'll react to being cooled down so quickly." Loki slumped against Bruce's now soaking embrace, hands clutching weakly at the lapels on his labcoat.

"Turn down the thermostat in the observation room. Sixty should be right." Banner ordered and Tony swiveled the computer monitor to bring up an internal schematic of Stark tower. "And try to get some fluid into him!"

Steve wrapped him in a plush towel, preserving his modesty as he lifted the slight figure in his arms.

"It's too warm." Loki muttered with a labored breath into Steve's collar bone, "There's a failsafe… use the fails…" but he lacked the strength to finish the sentence and just relaxed into soft flannel.

Steve carefully carried him back to his bed leaving Bruce and Tony to argue over the Toxicology report. He could feel every muscle in the Asgardian's thin body, tense and trembling around the labored rhythm of shallow breath.

The Captain set him on the edge of the casualty bed. It was cool in the infirmary, sterile and gleaming with steel and sunlight from the large windows.

Steve used one hand to keep his watch upright while he clumsily tugged loose green scrubs around his shoulders. Loki was calm and pliant, mouth thin and skin graying with sickness and exhaustion. He slumped shamelessly against the larger man, eyes squeezed shut.

"You need to drink something." Steve was holding a plastic cup to Loki's lips but he did not seem to see it, "Loki."

He took the captain's wrist in shaky fingers, holding onto it for dear life as he carefully sipped at the cold water.

"Where's Thor?" Loki croaked, pushing the cup away.

"I hope he's gone to find you help."

"I don't need assistance." He muttered, feebly attempting to straighten himself and doubling over under a wave of nausea.

Steve took the bedpan from the dresser beside the bed and held back his dark hair as he vomited clear, frothy fluid into it.

Loki whimpered and spat, arms encircling his abdomen, his whole body trembled.

"You done?"

"Mmm,"

"Good, just lie down now, you need to sleep." He guided the sick alien down to lay his head on the starchy pillow case.

"This must be what humans always feel like…" his eyes fluttered and for a second they gleamed a deep blood red.

Steve smirked, "it's not all that bad, you're just running a temperature."

"Everything hurts." He mumbled.

"I know."

"The inferior human medicine isn't having the desired effect."

"My mother used to put sliced onions in my socks when I was sick." Steve smiled, attempting levity, "maybe we should try that."

"What's-an-onion?" Loki slurred, blinking up at the red flannel blur that was Steve.

"Don't worry about it."

"Alright…" he took a few deep breaths. Thinking him asleep Steve carefully slid from the edge of the bed without rocking it.

"MMM," Loki groaned, tossing his head, "Where's Thor?"

"I don't know, just rest, I'm sure he's fine."

"Don't let him near me," He reached out one thin hand to grab at the Captain's fingers, "it'll kill him." Loki frowned, glassy eyes, searching Steve's face with an expression of earnestly which the Captain would never have given him credit for.

"I'll tell your doctor." Steve squeezed his hand in an expression of fraternity. Loki relaxed visibly, succumbing finally to deep, fevered sleep.

* * *

"Not long now." Bruce Banner addressed the darkness. Leaning on one elbow, eyes through the window, tracing the outer contours of the Empire State building, spangled with little art deco light bulbs, shattered into equilateral streaks of gold by the delicately woven curtains.

The cold city wind disturbed the drapery; the darkness was cut by the jagged yellow line of an echocardiogram, as it measured out the rhythm of an alien heartbeat. Loki's thin hand lay limp in his own, fingers cold to the touch. Bruce's warm, human breath misted in the chilly air.

The afflicted prince's condition was deteriorating and they had decided to keep a rotating vigil by his bedside in case he took a sudden turn for the worse in the night.

A little red light pulsed sleepily from the mist shrouded pinnacle of the building opposite.

Loki lay in deceptive repose, sleeping off the third seizure in as many hours. Horrible thrashing fits which lasted twice as long as they would in a human and seemed to cause the whole building to tremble. His body was weak, and Bruce was sure that if he could identify any of the structures in the digital scans as actual organs, they would be failing.

Bruce sighed deeply.

He wasn't a proper medical doctor; he was a particle physicist, a very good particle physicist. He had once been well respected in his field, he had worked in the medical application of gamma ray exposure and who had more practical experience in exobiology than virtually anyone on the planet. But he didn't feel qualified, not that anyone was. He studied the sleeping man in the bed in front of him. Dark eyelashes trembled and his lips moved unconsciously under the transparent green oxygen mask. Bruce was a genius, a born puzzle solver and completely out of his depth.

The stirring of icy fingers in his hand brought Bruce back to the present. Loki made a weak noise of frustration, sound refusing to flow through parched vocal chords. The heart monitor registered the increase in rhythm and Loki's fingers clawed at the sheets.

Seeing his frustration Bruce stood, taking a cup of water from the bedside table he sat on the edge of the bed, lowering the oxygen mask and guiding his ward's mouth to the straw with a gentle hand on the back of his neck.

Loki coughed and turned his head away after a few shallow mouthfuls.

"Loki?" Bruce hesitated leaning forward

His eyes fluttered a crack and wandered the room in lazy circles.

He mumbled something in Asgardian and there was some clear sparkle of awareness in his eyes which Bruce hadn't seen since the whole affair had begun.

Loki was explaining something, he moved his hand as much as his current physical condition allowed to compliment his speech, then frowned up at Bruce with questioning, childish eyes.

"English Loki." Bruce prompted, rubbing his thin forearm.

"The failsafe, father, did you forget your own twisted runes?" he squeezed shut his eyes once more, struggling for the strength to draw breath, "two hundred - should be ample."

"Two hundred what?" Bruce leaned in close over him; careful to catch every word of what he knew might well be Loki's last moment of addled lucidity.

But the god just frowned at him, his mind too far gone to the clutches of poison to process what Doctor Banner was saying.

"Two hundred, as the Midgardian's count." He stated slowly as if this was the most obvious thing in the world.

"I don't understand."

At this Loki seemed to become genuinely upset, his eyes screwed up, lashes wet with tears.

"Loki, it's me it's Bruce."

"It would be so easy, for you to just let me…" he turned his head into the pillow away from Bruce, eyes squeezed tight in anger, tears and sweat pooling in the crevices of his knitted brow.

"Loki," he touched the sick man's shoulder, "your father isn't here, it's just me, you're on earth, do you remember?"

"I'm sorry," Loki gasped, he looked genuinely confused, an expression which seemed alien on the face of a man who anthropologists like to call a 'trickster god'.

"I'm so sorry." He blinked at Bruce with the soft earnestness of a child. "Chaos just seems to follow me – wherever I go, all my life, - should learn to keep my mouth shut." His eyes were gleaming green and dilated in the dim light.

"Well you're not the only one." Doctor banner smiled in solidarity.

Loki cringed weakly, one hand twisted in the coverlet. He took a few deep, intentional breaths before attempting to speak again.

"Keep me alive as long as possible."

"Loki."

"It'll destroy my central nervous system first, s'already started. Except, no… cause… I'm…" he blinked desperately, shaking his head in an attempt to clear his field if vision. "Use the failsafe." Loki grunted in pain, screwing up his face and pushing his shoulders into the bed beneath them.

"What hurts?" the heart monitor sped up slightly and Bruce stood up, peering into the computer screen.

"My head…" he sobbed, involuntary tears of pain moistening his cheeks.

He gasped in agony, clawing at the bed sheets.

A gentle tremor rocked the earth directly beneath stark tower, the glass medical equipment made a chilling rattle on clean, sterile countertops.

Loki's eyes rolled up into their sockets and then he was out, eyelids at half mast, mouth open.

"Loki!" Bruce shook him. And at that minute the door hissed open and Steve and Tony appeared looking triumphant.

"I know what it-" Tony announced, but he cut himself off mid sentence in shock.

"He was awake, he was talking!" doctor banner shushed them with a raised hand.

"Bruce?"

"Come, on wake up."

"BRUCE!" Steve barked, his eyes were fixed, not on the dying demigod, but on the window. Bruce looked up, following the captain's gaze, he could see a great dark shadow swallow vast chunks of the city, one at a time until everything outside the window, the gleaming stripe of fifth avenue, the art deco decadence of the empire state building and as far as the eye could see, was dark.

"What do you suppose happens," Steve asked the two scientists, "when the god of chaos dies?"

* * *

Asgardians do not get sick. It's physiologically impossible, there is no virus, no infection no cosmically summoned ill humor which would ever penetrate that gleaming coppery skin, or cause those crystalline eyes to go pink and swollen with irritation.

Even grievous physical injury barely encumbers a warrior of that ancient race. But any living being, from any world, no matter how developed or how evolved will find themselves stricken down by the correct and surgical application of technology.

A swarm of ten thousand angry, microscopic nanites bit and lacerated their way through Thor's system, each deadly beast with its payload of toxin. Slowly poisoning his body, which spear and sword and axe had left unscarred, killing him one cell at a time.

His thoughts seemed to lag and hitch, words escaping his internal monologue so that the words in his head slipped into vague images, then colors, then light.

The first thing he noticed was that the gravity was too low.

The second was that the barometric pressure was also.

Rain slammed unceasingly against a metal roof, the thick gush of water from a drain pipe made a constant metallic ringing. It smelled like ozone.

Thor recognized that he was horizontal. The rough texture of artificial fibers brushed across his bare arms. He shifted his head to relieve the tension across his shoulders and gingerly opened his eyes.

Above him a window looked out onto darkness streaked with yellow where the rain caught the light from an outdoor lamp. He was lying on a couch with his feet propped on one arm rest and his head on another.

Under the rain he could hear the sound of a cricket, a thousand crickets. He longed to smite them.

"You wakin' up big guy?" a rough voice drawled from the shadows. Thor's hand went automatically for Mjolnir's familiar grip; he had barely registered its absence before an overwhelming and altogether intolerable sensation wracked his body. This was what the humans called nausea.

"Hey, hey, hey." The same voice again much closer, she smelled like cigarettes and mildew.

She held a trash bin to catch his vomit and held back the mop of unnaturally healthy golden hair.

Thor coughed and groaned into the green plastic container, his sinuses burned and his head swam so that when he finally rolled back into the creaking softness of the couch he had to squeeze his eyes shut to stop the room from tilting violently sideways.

"Jane said your name's Thor?" the woman sat on the coffee table and eyed him warily. She was shrouded in darkness, the whole room a mass of unfamiliar shadows, which to his fevered mind seemed to shift and writhe.

"Yes," was all he could manage, concentrating on the rhythm of his breathing, "Where is she?" he continued with considerable effort.

"Asleep," she brushed her thumb across his big shoulder, "I'm Wanda Foster, Jane's my daughter."

Thor frowned up at her, bits of memory coming back. He had flown into Cape Kennedy on the backspin of a hurricane. Crashing down on already weakening knees beside the six story deep space projection array. He had brought the computer online with a spark, Boost the signal and aimed the dish towards Asgard.

"How long have I been unconscious?" he asked, steadying the glass which Wanda held for him to drink.

"You've been babbling nonsense since Security found you passed out in the rain at lunchtime. You're lucky my daughter was working late or you would have drowned out there."

_Killed by a storm_ Thor thought refusing more water, _ironic._

"Have they replied?" he whispered.

"Nothing yet."

Thor's proud brows twisted in pain.

"Try to sleep," she urged, "save your strength."

"Thank you." The meekest twitch of a smile wrinkled his eyes, "kind lady." He thought for a moment of his youthful exploits on earth, he and Loki going to the cottage of some unsuspecting widow and toying with the petty needs of humans. He had scoffed at mortality and disease, now he struggled for breath and coughed up white foam.

He balled up his fists, closing his eyes tight and tried desperately to sleep.

When he opens his eyes again grey daylight is filtering down through the clouds, the rain has not lessened. He finds he lacks the strength to move.

In his peripheral vision he can see a shape which might be Jane curled in an armchair, hands around a coffee cup, eyes wide and reflecting the grey chips of light from the windows.

"-m sorry." He says finally, breaking the stillness of the stormy morning. Wind knocks a tree branch against the roof and a distant peal of thunder compliments the ever-present song of insects in the grass.

Jane's eyes settle blankly on him for a moment and then she snaps out of her thoughts and she falls to his side, leaving the coffee cup on the table.

"For the rain." He clarifies.

"Oh Thor," she pushes his hair back from his eyes; they are bloodshot and dilated and lack that familiar gleam of arrogance.

"I could have thrown it off course." he barely moves his lips to speak.

"And accelerated climate change five years?"

"Thas-not true." He slurs, keenly aware of the cold texture of her fingertips against his scalp, his skin burns and he leans into her touch. "I know what I'm doing."

He smiles weakly and she takes his hand, rubbing the flat of his thumb protectively.

Jane didn't want to let her worry show; she wanted to be able to brush the whole mess off. Humans got ill all the time. But his grip lacked a certain confidence, and she hadn't missed the way his speech halted and slurred, or the grey weight which seemed to have settled behind his eyes, the sallow pallor in his cheeks.

She had phoned Nick Fury as soon as the unconscious Asgardian was deposited on her couch. His news had been unsettling to say the least.

It was wrong, so wrong. Thor, who could call plasma out of the sky and into the palm of his hand, struck down by an invisible assailant.

"This isn't how it's meant to happen." He whispered, interrupting her train of thought. Jane's eyes caught on his but his gaze looked far away.

"What?"

"This isn't how I'm meant to die."

Jane smirked thoughtfully, "promise?"

"There's a war," he informed her with a quirk of his eyebrows, "a war that lasts an eon, a stone age, a sword age ere the world's ending." He recited in a broken whisper and a cough; he looked like he's struggling for breath.

"You know?" she asked wiping blood from the corner of his mouth.

"We all know, how it should be, so that-we- can prepa…" his eyes slid closed very suddenly.

"Thor?" Jane caressed one cheek; he didn't stir under her touch. His breath came in desperate shallow gasps.

Suddenly a loud rapping came from the front door. Jane looked up in bewilderment, then stood peering down to the front porch through the window, leaning one hand on the back of the couch. She left Thor with a comforting touch of his hand.

Three figures stood in the pouring rain in the gravel drive under the spreading branches of a live oak. They were all wearing elaborate, vaguely Scandinavian armor and were heavily armed.

"What have you done with Odin's son?" the dark haired woman who was Sif demanded. Her skin gleamed with cool, opalescent light where the anti-microbial force shield she was wearing caught the light.

"He's inside." Jane stepped back to let them through the door of the small house. Besides Sif there was a tall, fair lady in ornate armor and a wizened old man. The old man went immediately to Thor's sickbed.

Within moments the living room was crowded with pointy bits of metal and fabric. Wanda roused herself and after taking note of the closeness, went into the kitchen to make tea.

Itching with discomfort and a tingle of fear, Jane followed her.

Sif and the old man were carrying on an intense conversation over Thor's sleeping head.

The blonde woman removed her helmet, freeing a cascade of lush, pale braids; she stood by the door from the kitchen to the living room and watched them in stony silence.

It rained and rained and rained.

"Would you like a cup?" Jane offered her out on habit, with a friendly smile. Wanda pulled two chairs from the table and sat in one, blinking sleepily.

The woman frowned at her with an analytical intensity; she was reading, measuring, learning.

"Yes thank you." Her voice was sensually deep. She seemed to have made up her mind about Jane.

"I didn't expect so many to come." Jane dunked a teabag in an old Disney world novelty mug.

"Then you don't appreciate the gravity of the situation." She looked down on the human woman and in her glance was the reflection of a thousand centuries of war and death and blood.

"Will he live?" Jane handed over the steaming mug.

"I wouldn't be here if his survival were certain." She stated flatly.

"Sorry I didn't catch your name," Jane asked as she handed over the mug.

"Hlaðguðr Svanhvít," she smirked, sipping the tea and cringing at its bitterness. "Call me Swan."

Jane distinctly heard the sound of Thor's voice wrung in pain, she choked into her tea mug and sank against the kitchen counter.

"No, not yet, he hasn't nearly given up." Swan's eyes were too intense to look at directly. They blazed with a billion rockets streaking cross the barren bloody waste of no-man's-land. They are filled with memories soaked in blood and the violent doom of mortal men. They rage with holocaust, a funeral pyre, a burnt offering going up, up to heaven. "You can tell, there's a sort of quiet that comes across the soul right before you give up. I can taste it."

Jane frowned up at the other woman and deduced her function.

"I'm disobeying orders, coming for him in this state. It's not right. This isn't how it's meant to happen." Swan folded her arms, "I should have come for him on the field of battle."

A crack of lightning rends the air outside, striking the ground somewhere uncomfortably close, the wind tugs at the branches and the rain mists in through the windows.

"What happens?" Wanda asked.

"When a god dies?" Swan frowned intensely through the door into the living room. Thor was unconscious.

Jane could not help but choke at her bluntness, sudden heat prickling behind her nose.

"Does it frighten you?" Swan asked with a raised eyebrow.

"Of course it fucking does, I'm human."

* * *

And in the last age, you, son of Odin

In vengeful rage, the peace will have cloven

And so begins the era of flame

For you who the winds like horses have tamed

Will go forth in war for gods and for men

Your hammer will soar for glory again

The sunless day comes, and Odin's son wakes

The great wolf to slay, its wide jaws to break

Oh Thor who binds the swirling storm betwixt his hands

Thor who drives the curling waves into the sands

Men look up in wonder, when they hear your battle cry

The pealing crashing thunder, echoing in vaulted sky

Oh star shaker, rain rider, thou many ringed thane

Skull breaker, sea strider, Frost giant's bane

Thou anchor of Mjolnir's arc, to the Jotun bring dismay

Wielder of celestial spark, delighting in the fray

It comes; it comes, the final night, when sun turns black in space

Oh warrior brave take up the fight, for Man, and Aesir race

A serpent twists its coiling mail, through the roots of Yggrasil

Cry the ravens; tell the tale, their ancient auger fill

Heed ye well the feathered sage, crooked omens bending

A stone age a sword age ere the world's ending.

* * *

Somewhere in Iceland, c. 952 ad, winter.

Fat, purple clouds rolled low over the tundra and the sea whipped itself into angry curling breakers against the rocky shoreline. Thunder rolled majestically across the distant, jutting points of land and the sky showed a bright yellow band in the space between the spiking water and the heavy thunderheads where the setting sun speared below the edge of the front.

There was no rain, only a hard, constant wind which turned the sea black and the grass silver bright in the flickering illumination of an unnatural volume of lightning.

Chunks of ice churned in the frozen north Atlantic, it was very cold.

Mjolnir rocketed like a bullet down from the writhing heavens, aimed for the skull of the craggy old Jotun in the surf. She ducked in time to dodge the blow, but did not expect the hammer's return to its master's hand to be quite as dangerous and failed to get out of the way soon enough to prevent it cracking into her head from behind.

She recovered, clutching her wounded skull, and howled in rage at the crimson streak which crashed to the ground on the beach. Thor shoulder rolled into a crouch, mindful of his cape, Mjolnir cradled at his side. His eyes gleamed with the delight of a child smashing a sand castle.

The giantess was a majestic creature, nearly twice Thor's height. She was nude, except for a cursory decoration of seaweed and some carefully placed shells. Her skin was a mottled, frostbitten purple, icicles formed on the nipples of her exceedingly droopy, bare breasts. She had large amounts of matted snow and ice in the hair which grew in excess on her chin and betwixt her gangly legs and in short supply on her head. Where it matted in her pubic hair it formed a thick icicle, very sharp and unpleasant looking and covered in dark stains.

"Jarnsaxa!" Thor yelled, "What, in the nine realms, are you doing in Midgard?"

"Odin's son?" she ground out through yellow teeth, rubbing her head. "What makes you think I wanna talk to you?"

"Loki's been missing for three days. He was last seen going this direction."

"I haven't seen no princes, nor no little Asa out here." She asserted a bit too enthusiastically, "I come to Midgard 'cause your fatha took me home away." She re arranged strings of dark hair on her shining pate, fingering the swelling lump where Mjolnir had struck. She eyed the weapon suspiciously where it swung restlessly in Thor's grip, "them little humans be so tasty, and what wif me being a war vetwan and all, such a pity, I deserve a comfortable retirement…"

"Tell me where my brother is and I'll send the Valkyries after you instead of just killing you where you stand." Thor could feel his teeth grinding, something had set him off and for the first time he truly felt that his brother's life might be in danger.

"Oh, but that means I have a bargaining chip!" her eyes became round and seemed to flash yellow like a cat's.

But Thor was not in a gaming mood. The wind picked up and static electricity lifted strands of his hair slightly.

"Your only bargaining chip is your life, believe me we have our own ways of finding my brother." He spoke over a low, constant roar of thunder, the threat was very sincere.

"Bastard thought he could steal from me, thought he could lie and slink and trick ME! He didn't heven _know_ my mother!" Jarnsaxa looked genuinely upset and Thor wondered what Loki had said to make her so distraught.

"Where is he?" Thor demanded.

"Twenty feet down from where we stand," she admitted shakily.

"Alive?" Thor was surprised to feel a tightening in his throat.

"Maybe, how long can an Aesir survive without air under twenty tons of sand?"

Before he could stop himself Mjolnir was aloft, catching under her jaw and throwing her forcefully out to sea. He felt the bones in her face shatter as the hammer made contact. He followed through driving the blow into the ground, and digging, down, down, following some fading whisper of magic.

In the end it was more like twenty five feet, by the time he finally touched course green fabric, soaked through with sea water and matted with sand, Thor was filthy. He wiped his sweating face in his cape, already heavy with water. As quickly and as carefully as possible he extricated his brother's thin body from the sand, rolling him into his arms.

Loki's lips were soft with water saturation and whitish purple with oxygen deprivation. His hair stuck to his cheek. The god of thunder breathed freely again upon feeling the first shuttering breath tremble under Loki's chest. With kind reassurances and gentle hands Thor supported his head, gathering his slack limbs into his arms

"Loki?" Thor touched his cheek and his brothers eyes fluttered open.

His brows knit and suddenly this was no mere memory, the events and the terror of the last day rushed back to him and he once more recalled the raid, the knife, the poison which was creeping through his own veins.

The trickster had snaked his way into Thor's subconscious, invading his dreams from halfway cross a continent, calling up a memory of when he had felt protective, just so that Thor would let him in. green eyes struggled to focus, blinking away bits of sand.

"Hi, Loki." He touched his brother's hair affectionately, leaning back against the wall of the hole he had dug, looking up into the first prickling drops of rain.

"Thor you have to tell them." He leaned heavily upon one elbow, he looked incredibly weak.

"We're coming as fast as we can."

"The poison isn't what's killing me." He grabbed at Thor's shirtfront, pulling himself forward in earnestness. He spoke quickly and desperately, forcing the information out in the only way he had left. "There are spells, old spells, runes etched into my bones; the All-Father put them there when I was barely an infant. He changed my body." There was a flicker of rage in his eyes, "I was flawed, dwarfed, deformed, remember? Why Laufey left me to die in the temple!" Thor could feel rain on his face, he could taste the ocean and the ozone and the crackle of plasma in clouds. Loki's eyes bored into him exactly like they had on the roof of Stark Tower during the battle of Manhattan, bright and round and dangerously green. "The toxin," he explained carefully, "shouldn't even be making me sick. They must have changed it, they most have…"

"Loki!"

"It affects us magically," he mumbled, "all of those spells, all of those bits of magic and fire and ice which hold together the abomination that is my body, they're failing Thor."

"What do you mean, the spell that keeps you from turning in to a..?"

Loki nodded, eyes screwed up in pain.

"We have someone coming, I'm bringing a healer, our people are here, I'm coming to get you."

"Who?" Loki gasped, leaning back against the curved side of the hole.

"Sigmund, and Swan, and Sif, I think she missed you."

"Heh." A corner of Loki's mouth twitched, "tell Sigmund, to use the failsafe, he'll know, he'll know."

"I will."

"Thor?"

"It's ok, were coming as fast as we can."

"What's Swan doing here?"

"Just in case, for me." Thor cast his eyes down; he shouldn't have told anyone of the Valkyrie's disobedience, let alone his machinating, plotting brother.

"Thor," Loki suddenly was overwhelmed with the image of his brother lying dead on a smoking, reeking battlefield. A great wolf tugging on his entrails, body broken beyond recognition.

"I don't think I'm ready." Thor willed himself to wake up, desperation starting to tug at his solar plexus.

"Shhh, brother, just sleep, save your strength."

"I don't think I much care for mortality."

* * *

"And the rain descended, and the floods came, and the winds blew, and burst against that house; and it did not fall, for it had been founded upon the rock."

Thor woke with a twitch and a grunt. He took a deep breath of humid, stormy air. He stared sleepily at the low ceiling, trying to orient himself in the haze.

His skin itched and burned in the particularly nasty way which only Asgardian Healing runes incited.

That was a good thing, he told himself.

The rain was loud against the metal roof and the grey light did little to illuminate the interior of the room. The shuddering of the house in gale force winds was complimented nicely by a constant low level rumble of thunder and the flicker of lightning against the living room wall.

It was a good storm, not a Thor storm, which were usually flashier and less unwieldy. (He had never understood the popularity of the spiral model – impossible to steer) He had told the Man of Iron so three days ago as they sat and watched it forming on the Weather Channel over very expensive scotch and poptarts. Thor liked correcting the meteorologists. _They,_ called it hurricane Kevin, hardly a name for such a magnificent creature. Storms, of course, did have names, names which could only be whispered in the language of wind and thunder. Not names like men. And certainly not 'Kevin'.

He blinked, raising one hand to cover his eyes and ward out the first crashing chords of a symphonic headache. Frowning at his palm he observed lacy blue characters, glowing slightly and warm to the touch. His palms itched where the smooth ink marked his skin.

He read the snaking line which traveled along the inner side of his arm to his armpit. Then frowning down he pulled the hideous human style t-shirt away from his chest and read the interlacing bands of characters which traced the natural energy fields of his body.

Finding himself suddenly short of breath, Thor lay back and closed his eyes. He dragged a hand through his hair, clutching at his follicles as if that little pain would relieve the pressure in his head.

Rain fell in unceasing rhythmless music on the roof.

He was alone.

Where was everyone?

Pushing himself up onto one elbow with a grimace, Thor scanned the room. Blinking stupidly into the shadows he tried to force his brain to work. A bright stripe of light interrupted the open void of the back hallway. He could hear muffled voices through the open door. The sound of a news broadcast calmly recounting statistics concerning a large scale power grid failure in New York City.

_Government officials have come forward with a statement declaring the power failure the result of unusual seismic activity, but some believe this is yet ANOTHER act of rogue extraterrestrial terror cells, more to come…_

"The cloud cover's too thick, I'm losing the uplink," Natasha Romanov sounded tense as she appeared in the hallway, momentarily blocking the beam of light. She held a blocky satellite phone up above her head, and frowned up at the display screen. Her hair was wet and hung on her forehead in great red loops. She walked straight into the kitchen, paying no heed to Thor.

"Let me see it!" Sigmund's squeaky voice followed the human woman closely, his ridiculous purple wizard robes swishing over the carpet. "I do find primitive technology fascinating!"

There was the unmistakable sound of an electrical discharge and a squeak from the kitchen.

"Oh my god it's working." Natasha sounded unimpressed, "Tony?"

A pause, in which Thor attempted to hear what the Man of Iron was saying on the other end of the phone call, but concentrating that hard over the sound of the rain and the throbbing pain in his skull was impossible.

"I know, we got cut off – no – yes – he's here – okay,"

"Lord Stark?"

"No, this end, you talk here."

"Oh yes of course, Lord, Lord Anthony the Man of Iron? It's very important, what did you give him, what, potions, herbs, chemicals?"

Thor, burning with some unquenchable ember of fraternal love, sought to get closer so that he might hear more of his brother's condition, unfiltered for his ears.

"– Yes? – yes? – I see – oh, well that's not good." Carefully, like they were as fragile as vessels made of glass Thor tipped his legs onto the carpet, he managed to drag himself into a sitting position before his illness caught up with him and he was forced to close tight his eyes and cradle his head between his knees.

"Keep him on the ventilator," Thor looked up through a veil of un-brushed blonde hair lips drawn tight, nostrils flared, "keep monitoring for brain function – no, no of course you're not detecting delta waves! Tune your instruments to… one twenty. No don't use Thor's data; it will just throw you off, he's different." An impatient sigh and a very colorful Asgardian cuss. "you need a deep freezing chamber, capable of temperatures down to at least two hundred Kelvin, and some way to produce a steady stream of gamma rays. – yes, yes that's right. – if you recreate the surface conditions on Jotunhiem, there should be a built in failsafe – yes, yes, the planet has normal background radiation somewhere around nine hundred millisieverts – yes it will you'll have to monitor him remotely. How advanced are your atmospheric controls? Set the hydrogen levels at five forty percent volume. No – no – his brain doesn't work like that. Good, that should buy us a little time."

"I need to go to the New York."

"I can't take off in this." Natasha stated plainly, "I barely landed without crashing."

"And the storm shows no sign of stopping" Swan announced from the hallway.

The architecture was such that, gathering in the kitchen in their effort to not wake him, no one had seen that Thor was sitting up, listening intently to their every word. He SHOULD have been drugged past the point of sentience, wrapped in warm blankets, waiting for the runes to slowly pull the last of the poison from his skin and eventually fade. He should have been sleeping away his own brief bout with mortality in the decadent golden comfort of his childhood home. Instead he was about to do something distinctly uncomfortable.

The brilliantly colored afghan was pulled away from his legs and he was baffled to find that he had been changed into slightly too small women's sweatpants. Thor stood shakily on bare feet, eyes closed, head tilted to the left, one hand hovering above the arm of the sofa.

Thor took a few quiet steps, stumbled, and caught himself silently on the corner of an arm chair. Grunting in pain as the jarring motion made his vision swim like ocean waves. He struggled to fill his lungs but did not cough. Letting breath hiss through his teeth, he screwed up his face against the back of the chair and looking up, took the few, shuffling steps to the screen door.

He waited until he heard the oncoming roll of thunder before opening the noisy portal.

When, somehow, miraculously, he managed to slip outside un-noticed he fell for a moment over the railing, relishing the delicious feeling of rain in his hair and soaking into his clothing. Breathing carefully he grabbed the banister and stumbled as fast as he could down towards where he could not make out the looming edifice of the deep space projection array.

One hand on the aluminum siding, he limped around the corner of the house, and nearly ran straight into Sif.

* * *

"If we deactivate safety protocols eight and four we should be able to produce that much radiation." Bruce frowned down into the pulsating white doughnut that was the Arc Reactor, pushing his glasses up his nose.

"Without the safety protocols we won't have enough power to maintain the cooling chamber." Tony folded his arms with a frown, switching his brain to science mode.

"I thought this thing produced over five hundred megawatts a day?"

"It _does._" Tony shrugged, "and right now, most of that is being pumped out into the city." He raised his eyebrows at Bruce, leaning his hips against the cool railing of the catwalk which arched its way over the throbbing mass of light and power, the same gleaming light as the device in his chest. "Stark tower is hardwired into the grid so that if there's ever a municipal power failure, it will kick in as an auxiliary source of electricity for the city. It's only emergency power but, right now we're running a third of the traffic lights hospitals and subways in the greater metropolitan area."

Bruce made an, oh, shape with his mouth, nodding grimly but not saying a word.

"If I deactivate the safety protocols the power output will be dropped by a quarter, we're already going to need most of it to cool him down that fucking much."

"And I don't suppose anyone would be too happy if we sacrificed the lives of sick Americans for… space Bin Laden."

"Talk about a PR nightmare." Tony scratched his beard, "but it's only for a few hours until the starship troopers get here, he should still…"

Bruce was shaking his head, "he hasn't got that long. There are lesions forming in his brain tissue, even at this point, I don't know how much is left." They both blinked down at the glowing circle at their feet. "The fact is; if he was human I would have pulled the plug hours ago. This poison… whatever it is…"

"Refined Phoratoxin," Tony interrupted.

"Really?"

He had not had time to explain in the mad rush after the blackout, then the frantic, static filled phone call from Natasha to Steve saying she had nearly crashed the quin jet trying to land it in a hurricane on the tarmac at Kennedy space center. And an hour later the carefully explained instructions from the old Asgardian wizard for how, in a universe with no laws of physics and infinite energy they might be able to claim Loki back from the brink of death, or at least keep him from slipping over it until a properly trained healer could be brought there.

"It seems to have unique reactive properties when it encounters the energy fields put off by an Asgardian's body." Tony explained, "It mimics what I think is the neurotransmitter which regulates and controls what they call 'magic' inhibiting their body's ability to maintain homeostasis, and ultimately killing them. Now on its own it isn't deadly to them because they have such an advanced defensive immune system, but with the nanite delivery solution…"

"Good night Vienna." Bruce folded his arms and frowned pensively.

They both stood in silence for a long moment peering down into the light of the arc reactor.

"Tony, How much plutonium do you have lying around?"

* * *

Rain, rain constant rain like a Biblical deluge, singing down from the spouting gutters into the sandy earth, stiff wind howling up from some forgotten corner of the Atlantic. Water rose round the boots of the woman, dressed head to foot in anachronistic armor, who sat on the low paving stone wall under the eaves of the little trailer house in Eastern florida. The siding was colored with grey moss and dark red water stains, a curtain of rain fell in front of her face. Sif buried the heels of her hands into her eye sockets, willing this stupid, humanish reaction to an uncontrollable twist of fate, to stop, just stop.

Please, Loki, stop.

Sif snorted thick, salty fluid; she laid her head against the wall of the building, blinking against stinging tears.

Warriors shouldn't cry.

She heard the sound of a news broadcast from inside, the Midgardians were doing some dull Midgardian thing. Her apathy was infinite.

Just for a minute, Sif told herself, just long enough to control her emotions. Just a minute and she could forget that her heart was breaking and she would never hear his voice again. That thought circled around her, ringing in her solar plexus and tightening round her throat. That voice, supple like fine cheese, intoxicating like sweet mead precious as silver.

She turned her head unconsciously exposing her jugular to familiar kisses

But her mind was gone to tatters by the memory of that face, the sea bright aqua eyes, childish, cackling laughter, the very embodiment of mischief. Perfect white teeth between perfect lips and a toungue made of silver.

She almost smirked and then remembered that that mouth was currently invaded by some crude human contraption designed to hold a dead man from his destiny.

But not Loki. Loki was forever, slipping into her story to touch and covet, and run his fingers through her hair, and whisper spells into her ears. He could command her effortlessly with that tongue.

Chaos has no fear of war.

A thousand years of carefully filed memories had piled up at a dead stop when she heard Natasha's report of his condition.

When the plague had first struck, hundreds of ancient beings of light and wisdom had died before a cure was found. Frygga said he would be fine, said he would live, but no one recovered from out of the death sleep, the last stage of the plague was fatal.

The queen had been wrong in her supposition that his true birth would protect him; instead it was the very woven tapestry of magic which had repaired the broken, twisted body of a Jotun and a runt, which was killing him all the same.

Sif sniffed and blinked through another wave of ghastly fluid.

It rained and rained and rained.

And that was how she was sitting, hands hung uselessly between her legs, crying as quietly as possible on the garden wall, when Thor staggered around the edge of the house and nearly ran into her.

"Tho-" she started to say, catching him by the arm as he lost his balance, "What in the nine realms are you doing?"

She guided his bulky frame down to the garden wall, his hair stuck to his face and illegible black smudges were all that could be seen of the dampened runes.

"I have-to clear the sky." He mumbled, "have to get mjornu-" frowning into her face, he seemed to come to some conclusion.

"Thor!" she braced to launch into her best lecture on responsibility.

"You were crying." He cupped her cheek with one massive hand, silencing her.

"What of it?" she turned away from the fever hot warmth of his touch.

He breathed very evenly, trying to slow his heart rate. Clutching the wet paving stones on either side of him. "Is it that bad?"

Sif nodded, her lips going tight for a moment before her face collapsed into a mask of grief, "I thought we had him back."

Her voice cracked into a squeak, tears gushed across her cheeks and she fell into Thor's comforting embrace. He was big and fuzzy and wet. She felt a tremble of emotion deep in his chest.

"It's not over, Asasif." His beard scratched her forehead, he smelled like mead and ozone. "AsaLokke might yet live."

"If you clear the sky?"

The rain seemed to fall harder than ever, in vast slanting sheets which dampened their legs.

"Help me Sif."

"The runes will wash off," she glared at him.

"Then we must make haste."

"Indeed." Sif stood up, looking the god of thunder in the eye, "Where was the last place you had it?"

* * *

_Don't open your eyes_

Says the voice in your head the only thing holding you together, the last glimmer of sanity in a world without time or gravity.

_Don't open your eyes_

It's the only thing that matters, keep the last of the energy from escaping. Some vague fiction of life, all you have left to cling to like a dog fighting for the last sucked dry scrap of leather in the boneyard at the end of time.

You feel a chill slide of shining scales, cold as a ghost against one ankle.

The giants beat with clubs on ringing shields, their black beast unbound barks with bloody fangs at the white gold moon of Jotunhiem and the signal fires on the mountains are lit to call forth the ice warriors to storm the golden keep of the Asa.

_Don't open your eyes_

Because the pounding, war drums do not sound for you, here in this cave beneath the earth beneath Yggrasil's spreading writhing roots.

There are numberless serpents in the roots of the tree.

Another touch, this one lingering, the heavy, sinuous slide of cold blooded venom.

_Don't open your eyes_

You imprisoned in the darkest cave of the nine realms, tied, bound, gagged, burned, stuck like a roast bore, spread eagle on the unforgiving stone.

Your flesh trembles, slick with sweat and the grime of your imprisonment.

And it's touching you, running it's softly groping underbelly up your arms and across your back and between your legs and it's icy cold and constricting chorded muscles around your throat.

_Don't fucking open your eyes_

It's body is heavy where it clutches to yours, the sliding grip of it, constantly in motion on your cheek, your groin, your chest.

And you can't escape, can't move, can't breathe because it's bigger than you and more powerful than you and its body is constructed of a million gripping plates of icy slick scale.

But it's everywhere and there's no room to breathe no space which isn't occupied by that twisting cold flesh against your own.

"Come on Loki, open your eyes."

And the voice is not trusted but it's alive and it's something, something to cling to, so you open your eyes and the dark pours in.

For a moment you stare at the black, so much grander than the dark behind your eyelids, so much deeper. For a moment, in your blindness you forget the creature wrapped around your limbs. You blink and you realize that the world is very far away and that you could not wake up if you wanted to. You are trapped, trapped in the long suffering nightmares of chaos.

You don't see the strike coming but you feel the snake's body tense. The blow throws your head back and you gasp in pain. Time and reality shift in blinding white hot flashes of agony. You can feel the black worm's reptilian breath on your cheek, its long hollow fangs buried, one in the eye socket, one in the cheek, tearing the skin, pulling muscle tight. The hot burn of poison taints your blood, flesh, swollen red and raw grates into where the serpent holds you, clutching it's thick body around the desperately straining column of your neck.

"You're talking to a dead man Steve."

You can feel the ground shake.

* * *

The grass squelched and pooled around Thor's bare feet, his hair hung in his face and his lungs burned from breathing in the wet, nitrogen rich flavor of Earth's atmosphere. The sterilizing energy field next to Sif's skin crackled with light where the raindrops hit it. She kept one arm around Thor's waist, helping him stand half draped over her shoulders. He was a solid foot taller than her which made this positioning a bit impractical, but neither of the two Asgardian's seemed to mind.

They walked in silence in the rain pale forest, over pine needles which were dry in some places and flooded in others. The upper branches moved and whipped about in the wind, needles tossing like the manes of horses.

Thor was breathing heavily, leaning against Sif's side his wrist caught in her iron grip. He watched the earth moving under his feet which often dragged and turned uncomfortably amongst the roots.

He was exhausted already by the walk out here, he had tried to call the hammer to his hand but his own magic was tapped and so he had to go to it.

They stepped out from the pine forest into a broad stretch of marshy land. Thor looked up, blue eyes brilliant in the grey light. Beyond it, on the far side of an open field was a chain link fence and a boxy white facility barely visible in the rain.

They trudged across the barren half wild landscape, uninterrupted by human security forces. No one was looking for intruders in this downpour. Brown flood water sloshed into Sif's boots, she worked a long wet strand of Thor's blonde hair away from her mouth, breathing heavily in the exertion of carrying the god of thunder.

"Here?" they stopped at the fence, Sif looked up at the towering, skeletal projection array, three vast dishes, pointing up into the sky at odd angles, shrouded in falling rain and heavy clouds.

"Yes… yes." He pushed her away, catching his weight against the fence. He frowned through the wires and Sif noted with displeasure how the runes written onto his back were soaking into dark blue smudges on his t-shirt.

"Right," she looked up at the razor wire, deciding it looked uncomfortable she drew her sword. "Do you think this will send an alarm to the guards?"

"Undoubtedly."

"Then we must hurry!" she lifted the sword and slashed the weapon downward in an arc which split the wire mesh in two, she held it aside for her prince and followed him through.

The flooding had been worse than they expected. By the time they reached the deep space projection array they were both soaked up to the waist.

"Where is it?" Sif yelled over the howling wind, black hair stuck to her face.

But Thor had already disappeared under the brown muck. She folded her arms tensely across her chest, elbows dipped in the murky flood, waiting.

"HEY!" a distant voice barked. Sif turned to see a human in a black uniform step out of the facility's closest door and stand under the eaves. He was carrying a flashlight, an ineffective weapon.

She looked back upon hearing the desperate sputtering gasp of her companion breaking the surface of the water. Thor looked like a drowned infant bilgesnipe with his hair plastered down to his shoulders and his face and brown muck in his beard. She reached out to keep him from falling, the runes on his cheeks were almost completely gone, but he was smiling despite his pallor, Mjolnir clutched in one big hand.

"YOU ARE TRESSPASSING ON GOVERNMENT PROPERTY."

"We have to hurry." She told him, holding him steady at the elbow.

"Right." Thor frowned over her shoulder at the disruptive human.

"Are you sure you're strong enough to fly?"

"I have to be." He smirked and held Mjolnir aloft. There was a blinding peal of lightning which sent a harmless jolt of electricity through the water and Sif's body, and a gust of wind which blasted water from the ground and with a great arching swing of the hammer he was aloft, blazing into the swirling clouds of hurricane Kevin.

Sif watched him for a moment before, "YOU ARE TRESSPASSING ON GOVERNMENT PROPERTY." And "PLEASE VACATE THE PREMISES." Jerked her back to reality.

There were four security guards approaching from the facility. She considered, for a moment, drawing her blade and smiting the smug, human grins off their stupid faces, but she did not. Had they not SEEN the god of thunder take off in a vortex of plasma and water? Humans were normally impressed by that sort of thing.

"Are you aware that you are trespassing on the grounds of a government research facility?" the fattest security guard yelled over the rain, a jet of water poured from the tip of his uniform cap.

Sif didn't answer; she did not feel obliged to speak to mortals who she did not specifically deem worthy.

"Would you please come with me ma'am?"

"no." her eyes remained fixed on the grey heavens. "I'm waiting for someone."

"I can place you under arrest if you don't cooperate."

Sif smiled slowly, glancing around, he fingernails drummed on the rain streaked surface of her gleaming pauldron. "I'd like to see you try."

A weak, clammy human hand grabbed Sif by the wrist; that was a mistake. She struck like a viper and had him flipped over and bubbling desperately up from under the water in a split second. His fingers clutched at her wrists.

"Don't you da…" but something distracted her, something high in the shrouded heavens which made her cheeks go white with fear, she let go of the fat human, eyes wide with terror, "THOR!"

He was falling.

Sif threw aside the security guard into two of his companions, leaped past the fourth with an elbow to the gut and launched herself forward through the heavy, viscous water.

He was falling like a rock, plummeting towards the solid surface of Earth and there was no way she would be able to reach him in the few precious seconds before he crashed with the inconceivable mass of Mjolnir dragging him down to slam his body into the unforgiving ground.

He was falling to his death and there was nothing she could do.

Three

Two

She braced herself for the impact, rain streaming down her face

The unmistakable bang of an airborne body going supersonic.

A white bright bolt of gleaming light, fast as a silver bullet, intercepted his deadly trajectory, streaking up into the heavens, arching around to gleam white against the backdrop of grey clouds.

Sif watched, willing her heart to slow, willing her brain to stop whirling in fear, as Swan glided gracefully down from the bleak heavens.

Vast white gold wings supported them into a gentle, flapping slide onto a bit of dry land.

The Valkyrie cradled the thunder god's limp body in her arms, he breathed shallowly, dropping Mjolnir with a hollow thud in the wet grass. Slowly her wings faded into puffs of cloud and magic.

"Thor?" rain decorated his sleeping face, clinging in his eyelashes and his hair. "Come on," she whispered, "not yet."

His eyes fluttered, and then squeezed shut.

"What in Hel did you think you were doing?" Swan hissed at Sif as she sloshed over to where she was laying Thor back onto the wet grass.

"I wouldn't have stopped him, it's for Loki." Sif defended herself meekly. The two women made eye contact and swan's visage softened slightly.

"Don't let your feelings veil your wisdom, Asasif."

"I'm not the one disobeying a direct order from the Allfather, Volkryor."

Thor groaned from the ground between them, the rain had stopped.

"Vingethor," Swan knelt, peering thoughtfully into the prince's face.

He pushed himself up on his elbows, confused for only a moment before his face blossomed into a full grin; the two women looked up, following his line of sight to the poetic placement of a gleaming bright rainbow over the deep space projection array. The clouds were clearing.

Thor fell back, taking huge, grateful lungfuls of air, "it worked." He said quietly, closing his eyes gently, "it worked."

* * *

_Violence has erupted in parts of the greater metropolitan area, shops are left defenseless to looters and the police are overwhelmed. In new York's darkest hour, where are those who once defended…_

"Turn it off, Jarvis." Tony's face, with its deep, thoughtful crevices and the goatee of a nineteen year old, was illuminated by the soft blue light of a three dimensional manipulatable hologram.

"Don't you want to go out and join the fun?" Bruce asked wryly, shutting the door to the lab.

"What do you want me to do, spray them with a fire hose? I don't do crowd control."

"So you can take on Afghani warlords but a few teenagers with baseball bats get your panties in a twist?"

"the police can handle it."

"they could use our help…"

"It's not what the suit is for." The scraggly little spirochete which he had poised between his fingers rotated and flexed obediently, casting off a delicate web of light to sparkle upon the various half abandoned projects littered around the darkened lab. "Anyway," he carefully removed one mechanical appendage from the hologram, "I think I may be of more use here."

"Why?"

"Because I think I know why our friend is technically speaking, still alive."

"I trust it's not my expert medical care."

Tony smirked, "'fraid not, doc." He took down the holographic readouts with a sweep of one hand, "They're not killing him."

"I would disagree with that diagnosis."

"But they could have," he shook one finger, using the other hand to bring up a graph of Loki's vitals over the last twelve hours, "see, the poison progresses to a point and then levels out, his condition stops deteriorating, doesn't improve, just... The nanites are programmed to keep him right on the brink of death."

"But why?"

Tony ran one palm across his chin, bringing back the spirochete and thinking.

"What's this?" Bruce squinted through his glasses at the graph, pointing to a line which began several hours into the data collection period.

"I have no idea," Tony admitted, "I started picking it up a few hours ago, it was so faint I don't know whether it was just too weak to detect in the beginning or if it started spontaneously."

"They're gamma rays." Bruce observed, eyes flicking over the panel of code which scrolled along the right side of the monitor. "very weak, you wouldn't even notice unless you knew what you were looking for."

"And you do?"

Bruce smiled sadly, tapping the screen with one fingernail, "It's the same type of radiation that the tesaract gave off."

"Identical?"

"Perfectly." Banner scratched at his hairline thoughtfully.

"What the fuck is happening to him?"

"I don't know yet but look at this," he pulled up Loki's full body scan from the medical lab upstairs. "This is the normal detectable energy distribution." Splotches of gold and orange glowed at random around the alien's body.

"And this is what I'm picking up now."

"Whoa." The light was concentrated, white hot and throbbing in the center of Loki's skull.

"They're not killing him, Tony, because they're changing him."

"Into what?"

"A power source, a portal, their draining the magical energy from his body and concentrating it in one place. I think he's still fighting it, I think that's what's causing the earthquakes."

"How do you know?"

"Look," he brought out the chart upon which Loki's brainwaves were highlighted in different colors, "Based on what the Asgardian doctor said, this frequency should represent higher brain function, it flickers in and out but always!"

"Right before an earthquake." Tony moistened his lips thoughtfully, "He has that much power?"

"He's keeping a hold on a lot more."

"And how much is that?"

"A lot."

"And what happens when it gets released, if say we lose power and the life support system stops working?"

"Boom."

"So the nanites are making him into a bomb? Why? Is that just what these bastards do, fuck with humans for fun?" Tony ran two fingers across his lips. "I mean WHY? Before they were looking for the tesaract, but they haven't even made any demands, we don't have anything they want?"

There was a long moment of silence, the chair which Bruce was propped against squeaked and the gleaming microbe rotated slowly.

"Yes we do." Tony was the first to see it. Bruce frowned down at him. "We have one of the most valuable things in the universe."

And all at once the floor was shaking.

* * *

It took ninety eight minutes for the quinjet to fly from Cape Canaveral to New York City.

The plane vibrated as it cut through the brilliant afternoon sky, cleared suddenly and miraculously of any precipitation. Clouds sparkled into life at the tips of her wings and the east coast of America undulated lazily beneath her.

Inside it was tense and quiet. Thor was asleep, drugged. The illness had come back with a vengeance after his stint with the hurricane. Expending a great deal of magical energy and removing the healing runes half way through the healing cycle was apparently a very bad thing to do.

He became very well acquainted with the mechanics of the on board lavatory shortly after takeoff.

But Sigmund _was_ the third best magician in Asgard, and after the swift administration of a carefully measured potion, he had Thor asleep, breathing deeply, mouth open, clutching Mjolnir like a stuffed animal and in no great discomfort.

His head was cradled in Jane's lap. Thor had told her not to come, it would be dangerous, New York was in chaos, anything could happen, he couldn't protect her. He had said it with eyes of a man who had lived for thousands of years and never once, before that day feared for his own life. She found she could not leave him.

So he curled up on his side with his head in her lap, Mjolnir cuddled between his thighs and his belly, one hand possessively on the handle. The other hand was being handled by Sigmund who carefully drew magical characters into the flats of the thunder god's knuckles.

"It's such a contrast with how he usually is." Swan observed across the back of the quinjet.

Sif was curled up with her head on one of the Valkyrie's shoulders, 'battle meditation' she had said when her eyes began to droop, but Swan knew the truth, the warrior goddess reeked of grief and emotional exhaustion. She put one arm around her old friend's shoulder, long legs propped against a bit of internal architecture.

Jane sighed, stroking Thor's hair; he looked strangely old when he was sleeping, like for just a minute the long years began to show in his face.

"So what do you really do?" Jane inquired of the shield maiden, "because obviously you don't take the souls of wounded warriors across the rainbow bridge to Valhalla."

At this Swan smiled, "No," she shook her head, "humans do get creative with their fairytales."

Jane smirked thoughtfully, combing her fingers through thick gold tresses. Something inside her felt proud to be permitted such familiarity. She felt as if a tranquilized lion was greedily burrowing for warmth in the hollow of her stomach, letting her play with its mane. She threaded one hand around Thor's ribs and rested her cheek on the flat plane of his shoulder. He didn't smell human.

"An Asgardian's life is long, Jane Foster." Swan said with a tone of warning, "Don't think you're the first human girl to fall for it."

"Fall for what?" she relaxed against him.

"The winking." Sigmund dipped his head.

"The hand kissing." Swan offered.

"The childish bravado." His stylus scraped the edge of the vessel he was drawing pigment from.

"The naïve lack of cultural sensitivity."

"The hammer," Sif opened her eyes a crack.

"The cape."

Jane snorted in laughter, but choked it down when she felt the thunder god stir.

She did not protest, she knew how much Thor loved humans. She could never encompass, or really equal what he was, plasma and wind and thunder and rain. She could no less be his equal than she could rein in the clouds and ride them like horses. His ribcage expanded and collapsed slowly under her hand. She didn't need to, he would always be the stuff of legend, and she would always be human. For a moment she had considered the fact that she could outlive him. It was horrible. Abstractly she accepted that long story would come to an eventual end, but not in her time, never in her own time.

"Our world is very old." Swan seemed to have decided that Jane was worthy of some secret knowledge, "we, are very old. Our sun has burned longer that yours, much longer. By any law of natural progression we should have been blown away in a supernova millennia ago. But we aren't, Jane Foster, because we have a special gift."

Swan looked her dead in the eye with that unnerving stare.

"What do you know about the device which humans call the Teseract?"

"It's a- a power source, a gateway." The plane shuttered in turbulence, Jane found her fingers buried in Thor's shirt.

"But you know nothing of its origins." She shifted forward, dislodging Sif who woke up frowning and blinking.

"I thought it was Asgardian."

_"He was."_

"I don't…"

"Asgardians are not _meant_ to die." Swan gestured oratorically, leaning forward for emphasis.

"Swan," Sif looked agitated, she placed one hand on the Valkyrie's shoulder.

"Don't." Swan slapped her hand away, "I've been cleaning up your messes for a thousand years Asa-Sif, she deserves to know, the humans have suffered because of it."

"When the All father wakes he'll have your wings."

"Unless ravens can fly as fast as this plane, Odin knows nothing."

Sif exhaled angrily and threw herself back into the seat with a clank of armor.

Jane frowned as she watched the short altercation.

"We are not meant to die," Swan stated clearly, "meaning of course we CAN be deliberately killed. But, when we die, the magical energy in our bodies has to be released. It can be rather… kinetic, if the right spells are not administered."

"And that's your job?"

"Partially…" she looked nervously at Sif who just flared her nostrils."What I was saying about the sun. It was running out of naturally occurring fuel, we had to devise a way of providing it with more energy, and the greatest power source we had available was ourselves…" swan seemed to lose her breath.

"One Asgardian can power a star for a year." Sigmund looked up at Jane.

"Oh god."

"No one's sure whether the war with Jotunhiem was triggered by a real threat to Asgardian security, or, a necessity for power, for Aesir corpses. Death in battle quickly became a thing to be sought after, it was honorable your life energy would be drained back into the sun. And so the war with Jotunhiem raged for many years, unchecked with humanity in the crossfire. I was responsible for harvesting the battlefield, it was…" swan choked on her words, trembling slightly as she spoke. _"Were not meant to die."_

"But wars do not last forever, Jotunhiem fell and a treaty was signed and we had ten thousand years of sunlight. But, after a while we found ourselves back in the same situation, the sun turning red in the sky. Which is when Loki devised a plan.'

"There is a certain plant, a white berry with little round leaves which only grows on Midgard, deadly poisonous. The same toxin which flows through Thor's veins. By sheer luck it has reactive properties in the Asgardian nervous system. By sheer luck it can kill us dead."

"Loki engineered a nano virus as a delivery system, so our bodies would have no way of fighting it, using the sharpest edge of his cunning, a nano virus, which if released into the population would kill enough of us to keep the sun lit for the rest. But it got out of control, thousands died and eventually it reached the house of Odin, taking the life of his youngest son."

"There was a third Odinson brother?" the plane shook.

Swan glanced sadly at Sif, that was it, that was the secret.

"Balder was Frygga's favorite child." Sigmund said, "More handsome than Thor and more powerful than Loki. When he died, she was inconsolable, so, instead of putting his energy into the sun, the all father contained it in a special cube, locked in a reliquary, to serve as a memorial, the sacrifice of some allowed for the survival of all, that's what the Teseract is, it's a dead god."

Swan sighed, "I think that Loki blames himself."

Clint appeared from the cockpit, looking very tan and very shocked. "You guys should get out here." His voice sounded tense.

Swan and Sif both went to the only exterior windows at the front of the plane, ducking through the passage to the cockpit.

Jane clearly heard what must have been an Asgardian cuss.

"Jane you'll want to see this!" Barton yelled. Very carefully she extracted herself from under the weight of Thor's head. She scrambled over seats until she could peer down to Natasha's eye level.

Manhattan was screened in smoke, great billowing black towers of it, some grey with firey soot, speckled with flaming ash, some of it white with the pigmentation of shattered cement.

"Oh my god."

"Call Tony."

"I can see stark tower, it's still standing."

"Did Loki do this?"

"Not intentionally."

"This time."

"I'm bringing her around to land on the helipad."Natasha frowned up at the dials above her head and flipped three switches.

"Can you even see in…" Clint's sentence was cut off as the plane was thrown suddenly, violently nose down. There was a terrible, violent mess of bodies, limbs everywhere, hands groping for a hold as they spun uselessly towards the Hudson river.

BANG BANG BANG went Mjolnir as it was thrown into the fuselage.

Natasha threw her full body weight into the throttle, attempting to regain control of the air craft. The jet shook precariously. Finally leveling out close enough to the surface of the water to make a gushing spray up from the tops of the little river waves.

Two Chitauri scouts sliced through the graying sky above them turning back towards the plane.

Jane found Sif's arms around her middle; they were both sprawled on the floor of the rear of the jet. Swan had her full plumage showing as, for the second time that day she caught Thor out of freefall.

"Were under attack, everyone buckle up." Clint was shouting.

"Well that's no fun!" Sif snapped, depositing Jane's shaking body into the chair next to where a very confused and drug addled Thor was resisting Swan's attempts to fit a safety harness over his head. Sigmund, shaking violently, covered in blue rune ink from the ink well he had been holding, clung to the seat on the far side of him.

-Sit this one out, Asa-Vingethor, Swan was saying to the thunder god, as she pressed Mjolnir into his arms. If Jane had been a bit more educated in Asgardian mysticism she might have been surprised to see the slight woman lift the hammer with as much ease as its master did but instead she just clutched at his wrist, closing her eyes and hoping the end came swiftly if it was going to come.

Three more fighters screamed up to them. A few of their missiles struck true with horrendous, roaring bangs and the plane trembled in the air.

"Open the HATCH!" Swan shouted triumphantly, wings sparkling into solidity around her. Slowly it hissed open, coarse, smoky air from the burning city whipped in and below them the white tipped breakers of the Hudson lapped at the sky. Clint slid, arrow already knocked, to perch on the edge of the boarding ramp as it opened.

Swan grabbed the back of Sif's armor and with one swelling pump of vast white wings, they dropped into open air, the archer's arrows aimed at their defense, leaving the others with only the whistle of the wind.

* * *

Steve hated being cold. It wouldn't hurt him; that had been proven well enough. But it made him feel old. It made some part of his mind feel the crushing weight of years. He was split, a contradiction, trapped somewhere between twenty and ninety. He found himself mourning the days of his youth as he tried to build himself a life in two thousand and twelve, he had no family and no home, just training, missions, work and sleep.

He was drinking steamy, creamy coffee from a Stark Industries mug. The caffeine had no effect on him one way or the other, but it was hot and sweet and comforting.

He was wearing a comfortable red flannel and a US army T shirt with a yellow star on the chest. Steve was alive, he was Captain America, and everyone who understood him, who grew up in the same world as him was either decaying or dead.

Steve's breath hung in the air in ghostly wisps. Steam rose from his coffee mug.

It was like a science fiction movie. He watched Loki on a screen, vigilant over his ward. The room was cramped, just a bank of computer screens facing a wide window with only a narrow space in between. The chamber in which Loki was being held was originally intended for testing cold resistance in the Iron Man suit, it was secure, and very effective.

The environmental testing chamber had some of the most extreme atmospheric controls of any system on the planet. Right now the cooling systems were running hot, attempting to keep the temperature around negative two hundred Fahrenheit. Tony had concocted a sort of puffy chemical foam which kept the plastic on the medical equipment from becoming brittle in such a dramatic environment. The wires, bulging and dripping with foam, lay across Loki's chest like tentacles, and the ventilator mask like the alien from that movie which Clint had made him and Thor watch. A miniature arc reactor glowed softly upon his chest, powering the horrible contraption, throwing Loki's still features onto blue white chiaroscuro from below.

The prince of Asgard, had, for the most part reverted into the frost bitten indigo geometry of his natural phenotype. Loki's chest rose and fell in regular, mechanical, jerking motions according to the will of the machine which invaded his mouth. He lay flat on his back in the pixilated image, unnaturally black hands still upon the white sheet, a monster from a low budget sci-fi film, completely alien.

Steve frowned down at the energy output detector, a white hot sphere of it pulsed within the Jotun's skull. He watched in horror as the hard white light grew and collapsed, each time losing a bit of its containment.

But his gaze was tugged up to the normal monitor, something had moved in the corner of his vision, something impossible.

Just for a second, there, in the corner of the screen, he had seen the shadow of a man.

But it was two hundred degrees below zero and highly radioactive in there.

Looking up with a frown Steve reversed the video feed by a few seconds, but at the moment when he thought he had seen the shadowy figure, there was only a shift in air current, moving the sheet hanging down from Loki's death bed.

He frowned, his senses never deceived him.

"J-Jarvis?" Steve asked thin air.

"Yes Captain Rogers." Steve smirked in delight.

"Scan for life signs inside the ETC."

"Scan complete."

An image appeared on one of the screens indicating that Loki was indeed alone. Steve shook his head thoughtfully. Just his eyes playing tricks on him then.

Steve's militantly trimmed fingernails fell one by one on the chrome tabletop.

It was horribly silent.

He sucked in air through his nostrils.

The coffee cup vibrated on the shiny tabletop, making a ringing, buzzing tone, the coffee rippling in subtle concentric circles. Steve frowned at it for a moment, the porcelain rattled against steel, brown liquid sloshed over one side and all at once the cup slid over the edge of the table and shattered, spraying Steve with hot coffee.

As the ground shifted violently away from under his feet he found himself crashing into the floor. The building shifted and rumbled around him, sparks erupted from the light fixtures and windows burst under the sudden torque, raining down a waterfall of deadly glass shards onto the street far, far below.

Wind whipped into the small room. Steve's arms went automatically over his eyes. A horrible, grinding roar filled his ears and the tremors smacked his skull into the ground.

Thirty seconds later Steve was lying on his stomach in a pile of glass and ceiling tiles, an alarm blared, flashing red through the settling dust.

He coughed and sat up, blinking dust out of his eyes, hair all askew.

"Jarvis?"

Nothing, the monitors which showed the inside of the environmental testing chamber were black, yellow emergency lights flashed in the settling dust.

Steve pushed refuse off his body, fumbling for the Com link on his collar of his civvies, "Tony!" he coughed, "Bruce?"

"What the fuck was that?" Stark's voice came through the radio.

"How's Banner?" Steve's voice was laced with worry, a Hulk episode was the last thing they needed right now.

"Fine." Steve heard his voice from a distance. "I'm good."

"Stay put Rogers, were coming to you."

The captain observed the wreckage around him, still breathing heavily. He dusted off his sleeves, frowning out over the burning city.

Great black clouds rose here and there, where buildings had once been, some still folding into themselves in a slow collapse. Walls and windows and bodies disappearing into the thick, toxic smog.

The damage done by rioters in the night was suddenly inconsequential, as everywhere the city was crumbling.

Iron Man alighted gracefully through the broken window, with a hiss and a clank as his repulsors shut down. He was holding Steve's shield in one hand.

"Feel like being a hero, Rogers?"

Steve glanced once more at the blank screens.

"Is it safe to leave Banner here alone?" he took the shield.

"We don't have a choice, he's a big boy, and anyway, the Asgardians are five minutes out."

"Why do I feel like this is a terrible idea?" he raised his eyebrows at Tony.

"Because it's a terrible idea. Now come on, emergency services need all the help they can get."

With a final backwards glance at the grim steel door which separated them and Loki, Rogers grabbed a hold of one of the hand holds on the back of the Iron Man suit, tensing against his friend's body as his legs were buffeted by heat and the smoking vista all around them whirled with Tony's backspin. Steve ducked his face away from the onslaught of smoke into his eyes. He didn't have his uniform or the authority of a capitol A on his forehead. He was plunging down into the smoking canyons of what had once been a city of a million. Aliens could attack at any moment, and the destruction of the Earth hung in the balance.

Steve was, oddly enough, perfectly content.

* * *

Bruce banner was frustrated, not angry, he told himself out of habit. He lay on his back on a carpeted floor scattered with glass, the smoky mess of Midtown Manhattan spread out before the gaping window past his feet. Head and shoulders were obscured by the computer console, the control box for the electrical hookup to the Environmental testing chamber's internal video feed glowed blue on his face. It was haphazardly wired into an independent power source, it was working, everything was working, and yet all he got on the computer monitors was static.

Bruce sighed. Pushing back his hair so that it stood on end.

TAP

"Tony?" he tapped the communication device on the collar of the Stark industries lab coat he was wearing.

"How's progress?" Stark's voice came through, slightly strained with the effort of moving something heavy.

TAP

"Not good, we'll have to power it down and see firsthand, I'm not getting anything there's too much interference."

TAP, TAP, TAP, TAP

"Don't take any risks; the Asgardians will be there any minute."

TAP, SCRAAAAAAAAPE, TAP, TAP, TAP!

Bruce looked down past his legs, lifting himself on one elbow and frowning.

"Alright." He said, but kept his eyes trained on the spot where a shadow had just flitted out of his vision.

"Who's there?" he asked, cautiously sitting up, placing his hand between the bits of glass and emerging from underneath the edge of the table.

"Smash." Said a broken voice, inhumanly pitched and jagged.

Bruce placed two fingers under his jaw, looking around the narrow space, the wind whipped dusty, smoky air through the cavities left by shattering plate glass. The few chairs had been upset by the tremors.

He had almost made a full circle before he saw the bird.

"Jesus Christ," Bruce gasped, taking a step backwards and feeling his heel slip an inch over the sheer drop from the edge of the empty window. He forced his breathing to slow, rubbing at his eyes for a moment before opening them and confirming that the creature was real.

Its presence was as shocking as it was still. Eyes fixed on his with an unnatural sentience and it's chest puffed up arrogantly. It was black as jet and as big as a goose with a long, hooked beak and vicious, curving talons. It held something in its beak, and after assessing Bruce for a moment, continued it's task of striking it on the counter.

TAP, TAP, TAP

"What's that?" Bruce took a step forward, with some horror he recognized the shape of the Asgardian knife which had Poisoned Loki so effectively. He had it with him when the quake had hit and had left it on the counter.

"Smash!" the raven squawked, tearing viciously at the metal.

"No, don't smash!" Bruce approached cautiously. "I need that." He reached out his hand and was rewarded with a flashing peck.

"Bad human!" it opened its wings slightly, revealing rows of opalescent black pin feathers.

Had Bruce spent some of his time in university devoted to the Study of Eddic poetry instead of smashing atoms together he might not have done what he did next.

Bruce made a grab for the knife. He was met with a whirlwind of talons and feathers, as a second black bird swooped upon him from the window, scratching and pecking viciously at his back. As everything in his carefully trained and balanced Psyche screamed at him to stop before this went too far. He let go of the knife, covered his eyes, and sank to the ground in a desperate attempt to slow his heart rate.

"SMASH!" it screamed, flapping off out the window with a delighted croak. Bruce watched in horror as the bird hovered a few meters out the broken window, and dropped the knife over the street far below. It fell and fell, and disappeared into the dust.

Bruce shook his head at the bird in wonder as it flapped away. It's companion perched on the edge of the window, turning its head with a twitch.

"SMASH!" the bird croaked, clicking his beak and tipping quite suddenly out the open window.

Bruce stood up, perplexed and uncomfortable and yes, frustrated.

He turned around slowly, rubbing his hair, and saw with some relief that the video feeds had miraculously restarted themselves. Bruce peered at the monitor, blinking and frowning as his look of relief morphed into one of confusion, and then horrified sadness.

But the air was filled with the noise of straining engines as the quinjet came in to land on the roof two floors above him.

"Tony?" Bruce activated the communicator. Looking out over the city he watched in horror as familiar Chitauri scout ships cut between the buildings in pursuit of the plane.

"Yeah, big guy."

"You have incoming."

"I See them, let's hope the Asgardians can take care of themselves because I can't… people will die if I go."

"About the Asgardians," Bruce frowned at the monitor, "We have a situation."

"Is something wrong?"

"It's Loki…"

But the audio feed was suddenly overtaxed by a roar of collapsing masonry; it was so loud that Bruce could hear the rumble from outside the window.

Tony was shouting something unintelligible over the com, as the rumble died down Bruce could hear his voice, come through clear again, "STEVE!"

* * *

High above the smoldering city, two dark shadows crossed the sun.

The Quinjet streaked away from them towards the smoky mess that was the island of Manhattan. Hawkeye's crouching form disappeared quickly, leaving behind only the soft thud, thud, thud, of arrows striking alien flesh.

With a bloom of golden magic the two women morphed into full combat armor. Swan's winged helmet flashing silver as she burst forth from the belly of the plane in angelic majesty.

Sif's armor cut into swan's palms as he held her beneath her body, suspended in midair. Swan stopped short with a hard thrust of huge white wings, releasing her burden to fall into the trajectory of a speeding Chitauri fighter. The warrior goddess squealed with vicious delight, her armor gleaming in the brilliant afternoon sunlight, her feet wheeling as they sought for purchase on the aircraft. With a shining arc her sword fell upon her enemy, severing his neck cleanly, she kicked him from his perch and fell forward into the uncomfortable pilot's seat.

The alien's body broke the surface of the river with a sickening SHLORP!

Swan drew her sword in a trained and graceful motion as she tumbled through the smoky air. She launched herself forward into the rain of energy bolts. Her enemy shrieked in protest as he was impaled with his own inertia upon her gleaming blade.

She lifted him upon the sword, placed one boot on his chest and pulled the blade free with a squelch and a spray of dark, alien blood.

Another craft pealed out of the smog, catching Swan's wing and sending her careening towards the water.

Sif maneuvered her appropriated vehicle deftly; she watched her friend struggle to get her balance in the air, pushing the accelerator to cut off the offending attacker. She stood up on the seat and let herself drop backwards into open air.

The Chitauri craft screamed into its counterpart, smashing into a fireball and raining bits of hot shrapnel into the river below them.

Swan swooped low to catch the warrior goddess around her middle. Sif grinned, slinging one arm around Swan's shoulder her hair flying in her eyes, a little of the day's sadness burning off in the heat of battle.

"I really missed this!" she shouted to the Valkyrie.

"It's been what, five days since Muspelhiem?"

"I know." She twisted around to look the other woman in the eye, "I'm out of practice."

Swan laughed, catching Sif by the back of her armor, and throwing her with all her strength towards another fighter. Sif shouted with furious zeal as she fell upon her enemy, teeth bared and eyes flashing with the light of the Asgardian sun.

There was a short, violent scuffle in which Swan ended up in the air with a Chitauri pilot in the position that the Warrior goddess had occupied a moment ago. The creature clung to her breastplate and snarled great, dripping fangs an inch from her face. Swan snarled right back with fearsome grey eyes, tugging his vile body close and skewering him with her sword. It stuck in his ribs and required a boot to the chest to dislodge.

She threw the corpse of her enemy into the waiting surf, soaring in a graceful arc down to skim the surface of the water. Frowning up through the smog to where she could see Sif straddling the front of a fighter, matching its pilot, blow for elegant, vicious blow. Steel and sparkling energy crackled between them. Sif crouched, lunging ferociously into his gut.

But the Chitauri drone dodged her blow, snaking around in a thousand chunks of flashing, bony metal. Striking out violently, his weapon caught Sif in the stomach and she choked in pain. She was thrown backwards in her effort to catch herself her boot missed the edge of the fighter. Feeling herself begin to fall she grabbed her enemy's weapon, turning it, in one fluid motion to fire hot rounds at the creature on top of her, pulling him down towards the river where they landed with a SMACK and a schlorp of water closing over her head.

"SIF?" Swan shouted. Firing bolts of white magic, surrounding herself in a corona of light and with a blinding flash, the last three Chitauri were thrown from their vehicles.

The icy water slammed into Sif's body, creeping under her armor which gushed with bubbles. The weight of steel and bone dragged them down into the murky depths.

The alien was furious and fast and much better suited to the brown grey depths of the Hudson River than the Asgardian woman. She felt his body move close to hers in the dark water. Struggling to swim and lift herself to the surface, she felt strong hands grab her, pulling her down. A claw wrapped around her throat.

Swan beat the air from high above, sheathing her sword, folding her wings and plunging like a raptor towards the water. She pulled short just above the tops of the rolling waves, catching a desperate gauntleted hand slapping through the surface of the waves.

Sif spat and choked into Swan's chest. Clinging to her armor, breathing heavily. Her dark hair stuck to her face.

"How are they even getting here?" the Valkyrie asked her, she sounded winded.

"It's Loki," she looped one arm around Swan's neck. "He can travel between the worlds at will."

"They must have learned from him." Swan hissed.

They soared low over the burning city, cutting through the yellow grey veil of dust.

"Oh god." Sif breathed. She could feel Swan stiffen in horror as the vista of destruction spread out below them.

They could see the humans like ants crawling in the rubble, some wearing bright reflective jackets, some caked in dust, some fallen to the broken ground.

"We have to help them." Swan sounded sure but pained. Sif looked up at Swan's face lined with worry.

"What about Loki?" they watched as with a slow rumble, a half standing building collapsed into itself.

"Loki will be fine; Asa-Sif, Thor and the wizard will take care of him." Swan looked serious.

"Youre sure," Sif looked up into her friend's face, wet hair stuck to her cheeks, no battle had ever inspired such anxiety in her.

"The mortals need us Asa."

* * *

Thor leaned his elbows on his knees and his head on his hands. The safety harness cut into his shoulders painfully and his hair hung down to frame his field of vision, blonde locks distorting and lensing in the peripheral. The patterned metal floor of the aircraft seemed to shift and writhe before his eyes, Mjolnir was contained protectively between his feet, to the thunder god's eyes the hammer glowed and pulsated with magic. Everything had gone soft around the edges and his bones felt like they were made of rubber.

Sigmund had given him the good drugs.

Jane foster found one protective hand had fallen to touch his back. Thick, tense muscle moved under her hand with every labored breath. His body was still too warm.

"I should be out there." He whispered; quiet enough that only Jane heard him.

"You wouldn't be much help." Her hand moved to his forearm, laced with blue runes.

He turned to frown at her indignantly, bright eyes flashing. "I'm a warrior of Asga…"

"I won't let you." She interrupted with a stony expression, "How about that?"

Thor smirked appreciatively. He squeezed the hand which lay on his forearm. "As you will."

Jane felt something silly and girlish writhe about in her stomach under the clear blue honesty of his gaze. He looked vulnerable, and that was terrifying.

She wanted terribly to press her lips against the soft, gold bristled warmth of his mouth, but the safety harness would not allow that range of motion.

"Promise."

He closed his eyes and shook his head.

"_Promise._"

"I can't."

"You're sick," she lay a hand on his cheek, "promise me you won't pull another stint like with the hurricane." The lines on his brows deepened, and Jane stroked the angle of his cheekbone with one thumb, the poor fool had no concept of physical weakness, nothing which would hold him back, and Jane found that terrifying. "Promise me."

"If my life is forfeit for the safety of even one human, Jane Foster… it would be a glorious end." He leaned into her hand, "how many years does one man need?"

The Jet groaned around them as the landing gear unfolded and it made an elegant vertical touch down on the helipad atop Stark tower.

Hawkeye jumped deftly from the gangway.

"Come on!" Natasha marched past them.

Outside the sunlight was filtered into a yellow glow which masked the crumbling city around them. Clint, Natasha, Sigmund, Thor and Jane all filed down quickly onto the helipad. The humans coughed, covering their eyes as they emerged onto the thick smoke. It rolled and writhed between buildings, moving slowly in its own inertia.

But the group was stopped by a figure moving through the haze.

Bruce Banner ran forward, choking on smoke. He stopped in front of their company, looking tired and frazzled.

"Bruce?" Natasha sounded nervous, something entirely unnatural in her normally stoic persona.

Banner looked around at them, pushing his hair back. He looked as if he was attempting to find the words to say something.

"There's been an incident."

* * *

Many of the Christians standing helpless in the dusty canyons of New York mistook Swan for an angel. And it wasn't surprising, when one saw the way she glided down the smoky pillars to alight upon the rubble, wings wide as a fighter jet, gleaming pale ivory plumage in the smoky air. Sif, looking fearsome soaking wet and covered in alien blood, clutched at the woman's side.

The Man of Iron, of whom Thor had spoken, stood in the middle of the street, flashing metallic armor, a bright beacon amid the dim chaos. He was supporting a long steel beam which had nearly crushed a city bus.

"Oh great," said Tony Stark, "Space Vikings."

The warrior goddess dropped onto the pavement elegantly. "How can we assist, Man of Iron?" she asked politely, as Swan dropped to a crouch behind her.

Iron man stared in awe at the sudden manifestation of the Asgardians for only a second before assigning them tasks.

"Can you lift this?" he asked Sif.

"Certainly." She smiled brightly, alighting upon the buss.

"And you," he pointed one gauntleted finger at Swan and then up to the looming high-rise above their heads. "This building's going to come down any minute, Steve's got eight civilians trapped on the fifteenth floor, the support structure's cracking, GO!"

Swan was aloft in an instant, and Sif carefully took Tony's place supporting the I beam while he stabilized the outer wall of the bus.

Swan flew up to the fifteenth floor, catching her hands on the edge of the broken window. She dropped into a dark office space. Abandoned cubicles strewn with papers and smashed computers crisscrossed the floor. She heard the faint sound of life from the far corner of the building.

She made her way swiftly across the open office. Peering curiously into the strange human spaces with their alien furnishings, pinfeathers brushing the carpet.

An open elevator shaft loomed ahead, a deep stripe of black amid the shadows. It was propped open with the flashy round captain America shield. A hand appeared over the edge of the open door and Steve Rogers pulled himself over the edge.

"Sir Steven!" she ran to grab the trembling woman from his arms. Swan's eyes scanned the heraldry on his shield, "Thane of the single star."

"Uh?" Steve frowned up at her. Blinking away the fine shower of dust which fell down onto his face from higher up the elevator shaft, "You're one of Thor's people?"

"Yes," she reached down to help him lift an older man up from the stalled elevator car. The shaft was windy and smelled of cement and damp. "I can fly these people down to safety."

"How many can you take at a time?"

"Two, but it doesn't matter the weight."

The ground trembled, and Steve had to clutch himself tight to the ledge.

"GO!"

Swan was away in a flash, the old man and the woman safely clutched at her waist. The woman was sobbing and shaking. The man was silent, holding his briefcase to his chest desperately.

The woman screamed and kicked her feet when Swan made straight for the smashed window. They plunged into the dim, ochre smog with a swell of vast wings and the grace of a being that operates in lower gravity than it is accustomed to. She dropped to the ground for only long enough to register Sif and Tony, digging through broken cement. She launched herself into the air with a blast of thick, dusty wind.

Swan ducked back into the office, hurrying towards the elevator shaft. She turned a corner and felt the Earth tremble underneath her.

The Captain America shield shifted slightly.

Steve pulled himself over the edge of the elevator. Face streaked with dust and soot, carrying another woman. The civilian climbed over the edge, steadying herself against the wall of a cubicle.

Swan felt the floor start to move under her as she launched herself forward.

There was a horrible, crashing roar of shattering masonry all around them. Outside the windows, stories and stories of neighboring buildings rushed upward. Swan, like meteorite from a distant star, slammed through the cubicles, catching Steve Rogers around the shoulders.

The Captain may have made some noise of protest, as he was thrown, bodily against the opposite wall of the elevator shaft, but it was drowned out in the din. He ducked against her armored chest, sheltering in the canopy of soft wings as the building crashed down around them.

* * *

"The electrical systems are all going haywire." Bruce explained apologetically, fiddling fruitlessly with the controls on the display monitor. "You two will just have to go in there alone." The screens had returned to their state of useless static.

"How much were you able to warm it up?" Jane asked, frowning at the fellow scientist's useless equipment.

"It's about ten below right now… but…"

"It's still pretty radioactive." Jane read off one of the few operational monitors.

"Well_ I_ can't go in there…" he pushed his glasses up his nose. Bruce frowned at her, and then back at the recording he was rewinding.

"What was the incident you were speaking of, Banner?" Thor asked calmly, folding his arms in a knot of muscle across his chest.

"The video didn't pick it up?" He looked baffled.

"What did you see?" Jane leaned in to frown at the monitor.

"Someone was in there."

"What?" Thor unfolded his arms, "Open the door!"

"The controls are locked." He flicked a few switches, to no avail.

"Useless human slag!" Sigmund sent a bolt of magical energy through the locking mechanism, it clicked open satisfyingly.

Thor had to use his full weight and almost all of his tragically reduced upper body strength to force the heavy steel door open. Inside there was another locking mechanism and a broken sliding door stood slightly ajar.

A breath of freezing air hit the two Asgardians head on.

"Loki?" Thor addressed the darkness, expecting his brother to answer. The stygian pit of the testing chamber yawned blindly before him. Sigmund produced a light spell with the snap of his fingers and held it up against the darkness.

The room was empty except for the medical cot which sat lonely and white in the center of the room.

Loki laid unnaturally still, Life support equipment scattered around his body. One deep, frostbitten blue hand lay softly on his stomach, deep red eyes wide and blank.

The Asgardian knife had been brutally, messily used to cut through the dark, soft skin at his throat, severing his carotid artery and the intubation tube with one hacking stroke. The bedclothes and pillows under Loki's head the were soaked with the dark maroon of Jotun blood.

The noise which Thor made was horrible to hear in its inarticulate simplicity as he fell to his knees on the dark steel ground beside his brother.

Sigmund rushed forward in the thunder god's wake.

"No, no, no, no." Thor carefully lifted Loki into his arms, desperately groping at the back of his neck to feel for any lingering spark of living magic in his body.

Sigmund fell beside him, breath misting in the freezing air. With trembling hands he pulled the knife from where it was lodged. The wound did not bleed.

The two Asgardians made eye contact and Sigmund shook his head.

"Loki?" Thor asked meekly, pushing dark hair out of his brother's face. But there was no response. Blood showed up cruelly bright on his dusty blue lips. "We were on time." He stroked Loki's cheek with the flat of one thumb. "We were on time…"

The thunder God's desperate supplications went unheard. Loki looked peaceful in a way that he never should have, without the constant possibility of mischief glittering behind those dead, blood red eyes.

"Thor?" Sigmund's hand touched his shoulder cautiously. "He's been tapped."

Thor squeezed shut his eyes around sudden, hot tears. His misting breath came in puffs.

Through the veil of pain, he studied Loki's face with an intensity which, in all the long millennia he never had before. In the relaxed tableaux of death he looked strangely artificial, like a statue carved from some dark, polished stone.

"I'm not ready," he stroked his brother's shoulder, holding him closer than he ever would have in life, dark hands curled into the space between them, limp and twisted without the will of their owner. "I'm not ready to be alone."

Thor clutched mutely at his brother's slight body, heedless of the blood which stuck under his fingernails and soaked through the fabric of his shirt.

"Who's the one responsible for this?" Sigmund was yelling at someone outside the testing chamber.

"He's been what?" Jane was asking.

"Stabbed, he's been murdered."

"I told you," Banner was struggling to keep his voice level, "There was someone in there, there was…"

"And I suppose our useless, human sticks and rocks computer system, just forgot to record him?"

"Now just wait a…"

"I want an explanation Human!" Sigmund snapped.

Thor saw what was about to happen even as it was; he let Loki fall from his arms as he stood up and made for the door.

The roar of the Hulk echoed with a cruel, ringing note of triumph between the dusty towers of the rattled city.

And the heavy steel door slammed shut a foot in front of his face.

* * *

Steve swam back towards consciousness slowly. Then very quickly as he registered the pounding mass in his skull and the familiar burn of shrapnel in his skin. He inhaled, and amid the asbestos and the blood and the pulverized cement he smelled a sweet heavenly perfume, like vanilla and jasmine and the summer of nineteen thirty eight. Shifting his weight he was greeted by the soft brush of feathers against his cheek. He was pressed close to a warm body, soft under shifting scale mail; there was long hair in his mouth.

"Sir Steven?" Swan asked, her breath was warm on the Captain's cheek. He felt cool fingers touch his neck. "You coming back?"

Steve made a noise which was not words; he tried to move and discovered that his legs were immobilized.

"Don't." a hand held him firmly at the hip. "They're broken."

"Shit." He slumped into Swan's arms, breathing heavily against her shoulder.

"I used a numbing spell; you're very resilient, for a human." Steve smiled in the darkness, usually analgesics had little to no effect on him, but whatever Swan had done made him feel like he was floating on a cloud of ice.

"Thank you." He finally willed his eyes open and was greeted with pitch darkness. "What happened?"

"Aftershock." Swan moved slightly and Steve felt her chest brush his right hand which was pinned between them. Little rocks cascaded down from the gap in her sheltering wings.

"How much room is there?" Steve moved one hand and immediately touched soft feathers.

"Not much," he reached up and felt rubble shift on the far side of the wall of stiff pinions which arched over his back. Swan jerked in pain, pulling air through her teeth inches from Steve's ear.

"Don't," she caught his hand, "don't do that."

"How much weight are you holding up?"

"Not too much." She rested her head back into the sharp, shifting gravel. A support beam had fallen above them, creating an open space barely large enough for the two of them pressed close together. "Don't worry," she sounded oddly cheerful, "This won't kill me, and as for you, you'll suffocate before you're crushed."

"How comforting," he blinked but his eyes only registered darkness, "How long was I out?"

"Five minutes," she said, "You took a pretty hard blow to the head." Steve touched his skull to verify her diagnosis, his fingers came away wet.

"Shit." He breathed, rubbing sticky fluid between his fingers.

There was a moment of silence, broken only by the sound of breathing. He was inappropriately well aware of the warmth of the Valkyrie's body. Filthy and bloodied and alien as she was. Her soft, narrow thigh pressed against his groin and he was glad of the concussion and the healing magic which left him drained of any energy his body might have allocated elsewhere.

"Call Tony…" he mumbled into the bed of soft feathers, "is my radio intact?"

"I already tried," she choked on dust, "Too much interference."

Steve struggled to pull a hand free and reached for the radio on his collar. The green light seemed blinding to their dilated eyes and for a moment his vision was filled with the claustrophobic cocoon of gleaming armor and white wings and the woman's face, she had a cut on her lip and the beginnings of a black eye, she looked old and tired and like a battered veteran of a thousand wars.

But the radio broadcast nothing but static.

"Shit." He said for the second time.

Darkness closed once more.

There was a long silence and Steve could feel the softness of the feathers and the weight of the healing magic and the scent of woman and stardust pull him down into a drowsy stupor.

"Sir Steven!" Swan was shaking him, "Stay awake."

"Captain," He corrected her, "-s Captain Steve." He breathed slowly, "We don't have, 'sirs'… in America."

"Is that the name of this realm?" she asked, fishing for something which would keep him alert.

"mmm."

"Tell me about it."

"It's the best."

"Were you born here?" an inane path of conversation, but Swan wanted to keep things simple, Steve, however, deflected.

"What's your name, Asgardian."

"I'm Swan," she said and he could hear the smile in her voice, "And it seems I am pathologically driven to rescue human warriors."

Steve smiled at her classification in the darkness.

"That's a strange name." Perhaps he would have been less blunt had it not been for the head injury.

Swan laughed and her chest brushed against the captain's. "I think 'Steven' is a strange name."

The captain smiled in the darkness.

"Thank you,"

"Hm?"

"You saved my life."

"Humans are very fragile." He felt her hand on his thigh, touching the throbbing, warm swell at his kneecap.

The light from the radio made them both flinch as it flashed to life.

"Rogers' ca… …hear me?"

The captain groped for the radio. "Stark, is that you?"

"It's good to hear your voice Cap." Tony must have adjusted something because his voice came through bright and clear. Steve saw Swan grin in the dim light.

"I'm with Swan, any idea how deep we are."

"You've got a skyscraper on top of you."

"I noticed."

"It's going to be a few hours, just hang tight."

Steve frowned at the Valkyrie, her lips were pressed together in an expression of worry.

"Tony…"

"Yeah, cap?"

"I don't think we have a few hours worth of air."

"Just sit tight, you didn't have much air under three feet of ice either." Steve cringed, Swan looked intrigued.

"We must have fallen to the bottom of the elevator shaft, Swan caught me."

"Well… Odin bless the space Vikings, right?" he said with more than a hint of sarcasm. Steve let his head drop back in relief.

They lay together in silence, using up their oxygen one lungful at a time. Swan noticed the captain's breathing start to slow.

"Three feet of ice?" she asked.

"mmph."

"You _are_ resilient." She said, "for a human."

The Captain laughed as the radio went dark again.

"I'm not a normal human."

"No," he heard the sound of feathers rubbing against one another.

"Think we could dig our way out?"

"Not with your legs."

"Right." Steve cringed; he had forgotten his injury under the soft buzz of magic against his skin.

They fell silent for a few moments, swan cringed, the weight on her wing was agonizing but she did not want the human to know, "Your heraldry, does it represent your realm, or your lineage?"

"What?"

"Your heraldry, on the shield?"

"Oh…"

"It's very nice."

"The shield!" he opened his eyes which he had not been aware of closing in the darkness.

"It's underneath me, stuck fast."

Steve groaned, hoping vaguely that this new piece of information would aid in their escape, but it did not.

"Shit," Tony's voice came through the radio, "Something's happening at the tower, hang tight Cap."

"Stark? what's going on?"

But there was silence from the other end of the radio.

"Tony."

"Steve!" a tremor had fallen over Iron man's voice.

"What's wrong?"

"something's wrong with the sui…"

He was cut off abruptly with a cry of discomfort.

"Tony?"

Silence.

"Stark, can you hear me?"

More silence, stretching out like a damning finger in the darkness.

"Sir Steven?" Swan's voice was shaking, strangely high pitched and feminine. Her hand landed on his wrist.

"What's wrong?" he asked, her grip was like iron.

"He's dying…"

The interior of the testing chamber was dark and freezing cold, featureless steel walls rose on each side and the only light came from the medical equipment, the arc reactor power source which was still running them, and high in one corner, the light of a security camera, behind a dark glass dome.

With a cry of rage and a spray of gold hair, Thor slammed Mjolnir into the solid steel door. It made a hollow clanging sound and left a rectangular dent. Again and again he tried, sparks flew where the metals scraped together, but the portal held true and he soon felt his muscles ache with the now too familiar burn of toxin in his blood. He dropped the hammer with a loud clank. Resting his head on one raised forearm.

He could hear the hulk's muffled bellow echo from far away. It was very cold.

"Jane." Was all he could whisper. She was out there, with the monster with her fragile body built on chemicals and biology, so easily crushed under the rough hands of gods. Lady Natasha and the hawk eyed warrior could handle themselves, but arrows and words were little use against such a beast. They needed him. And he was trapped in this infernal prison.

And where in the Nine Realms were Swan and Sif?

He growled in frustration snatching Mjolnir from the ground and with all of his remaining strength, he drove the hammer into solid steel.

The door dented slightly outwards, but remained unmoved.

His side had gone cold; down to his fingertips was all pins and needles. He dropped the hammer from numb fingers, breathing through a deep rattle in his lungs, spots floated around the edge of his vision, flickers like lighting in the margins of his senses. The runes burned hotly on his skin.

With an enraged, feeble grunt Thor punched the door and left an imprint of his knuckles to mar the polished chrome, the deformation sparkled in the half light. His breath rose in a thin mist before his face, his eyes were burning and he couldn't force himself to turn around.

Gasping at shallow breath the thunderer slumped into the wall beside the door, resting his back on the cool surface and sliding to the floor with a grunt of pain and a hand clutching his stomach. He laid his head on one knee, eyes closed, he couldn't look up, he couldn't force himself to acknowledge the corpse in the shadows.

Thor pulled one hand across his mouth, feeling the hardened spot where Mjolnir's leather grip had rubbed his skin for millennia, the slight texture of runes drawn into his palms. They burned on his chest and on his cheeks. A stray lock of hair moved with each breath

"What do I do?" he asked Loki, desperately listening for an answer, a sound, anything but the horrible silence. "You're always the one with the plan." His voice was shaky. "you were to be my chief advisor you know." He rubbed his beard with one hand. "When I became king." Silence. "You're so much smarter than me. The things you can do Lok…" he turned and forced himself to look upon the dimly silhouetted figure lying prone on the blood soaked hospital bed. Thor leaned back, studying the body. It was strange to see his brother in his unaltered form, his skin was a deep turquoise under the yellow light of the flat lining electrocardiograph. .

The truth was he had never hated frost giants. Prejudice of any kind was not like him, but in his youth it had never occurred to him that he could call one brother.

Something clicked.

And then it was silent, oppressively silent, silent like the stars over Asgard during the long unchanging nights. His home world had no axial tilt, like earth did, and thus no spring, no fall, the trees were always green and gold and the breeze was always warm, and the years blended together into one long dream of gold and light.

There is no word in Asgardian for winter.

Back when the Bifrost was first erected, millennia ago, the initial wonder of Midgard was the cyclical nature of its weather patterns. The native hominids had evolved to thrive in a world which should have been uninhabitable for such delicate life forms.

Of particular interest were the natives of the far north, who had developed wonderful techniques to compensate for the wild fluctuations in climate. Humans were fascinating creatures, beings of years, locked into time, locked into the seasons. Earth, in that incunabular era, was peaceful, and free.

In the back of his mind Thor heard the distant hissssssss of gas being released.

And Midgard's greatest gift? The honeybee; a creature so dependent on that wildly fluctuating climate, on the particular plants, the gravity, everything that was beautiful about the Earth, that they would never live anywhere else, even in Asgard's gleaming gardens, they would quickly die for want of their own sun. The honeybee which was the most treasured, the most sacred of all insects to the Asgardians for one simple reason.

Honey is necessary for the making of Meade.

"Do you remember Thrym?" Thor asked his dead brother, his words slurring slightly, "you looked great in a dress." He couldn't taste the gas in the air.

"I don't know how I'll rule without you," he blinked to eschew the spots from his vision, "you're a liar, and an asshole, and a manipulative Jotun bastard, but I could always count on you," Thor's eyes burned with tears, he struggled to draw breath, "Goodbye Loki."

It occurred to him, as the floor swung up and around to smack his face into the ground that Tony Stark didn't know the carefully balanced potions which must be made with old magic and advanced science which could knock out an Asgardian.

He was only marginally conscious of the sound of the door opening, the beam of afternoon light which cut in through the shattered windows, or the silhouette which barred it.

* * *

The hulk's roar vibrated through the dusty canyons of Manhattan. Fire fighters and emergency workers looked up round eyed in fear through the smog.

The beast plummeted from the ninety fourth floor of Stark tower, grabbing at the steel and stone of architecture as it rushed past. Rolling and thrashing its great green limbs in rage, muscles bulging taut and quivering under tough skin. Spittle flew from his white, fanged teeth and sparks of madness kindled in its eyes.

The slight, bony body of the ancient, frail Asgardian thrashed in his great, green fist. Purple robes flapping and billowing wildly in the wind. His long, white beard blowing up into his eyes as he screamed into the oncoming wind, beating his small fists on the creature's unyielding grip.

They plummeted into the city, the settling, toxic dust, the rubble, the blood and the violence coming up quickly to meet them

Sif and Tony looked up in unison, figures of steel and red and violence amid the thick yellow smoke. Sif squinted through the dust which was settling on her shoulders and in her dark hair snarling up through the haze.

"Shit," Tony said plainly, "Something's happening at the tower, hang tight Cap." cutting off the audio feed he had just established with the Captain, Iron Man looked down at the dark haired Asgardian. "Can you take him?"

Sif's blade rang out joyfully as she swept it from her scabbard, an enthusiastic light in her bright eyes; she took a battle stance in the middle of the rock strewn street. "Gladly." Her hair whipped into her mouth, even as her helmet materialized, securing the silky black locks in place.

For a second Tony stark was actually concerned about Bruce Banner's health. He watched as the Hulk's heat signature, barely a green blur to the naked eye, hung with simian agility from the overhanging architecture of HIS once pristine sky scraper. The beast bellowed, white fangs dripping with spittle, whacking the old man's body repeatedly against the slick stone wall of the tower.

Tony cringed.

The wizard attempted valiantly to put up a fight, throwing off sparks and bursts of plasma which only served to further enrage the beast.

"Want a lift?" Tony asked.

She looked at him blankly then seemed to understand, "There's a strap on the back of my armor." Sif crouched and tony kicked up from the ground; they streaked into the air atop a pillar of disturbed dust.

Tony hastily reestablished the link between him and the captain.

"Steve?" it didn't go through.

Sif spread her arms under him, enjoying the rush of cool air over her body, filtering down into the sweaty crevices of her armor, still waterlogged and reeking of river.

But as Tony flew he felt one of the repulsors in his boots short out. He found himself suddenly lopsided, limping crookedly through the air. He easily recovered, kicking the damned machine into life, eliciting only a glance of concern from his passenger.

"It's fine." He said nervously but found that the joints in the suit had become suddenly stiffened.

"Steve!" a tremor had fallen over Iron man's voice.

"What's wrong?"

"Something's wrong with the sui…"

AAH! He felt it like a vice which closed upon each of his limbs, jerking them here and there, the normally comfortable confines of the suit shifted and adjusted their complex mechanics around his body with no thought to the will of his brain. The biting, pinching insides had never felt so claustrophobic, so un naturally tight.

He tried desperately to shun the blank, rising terror which was clouding his vision with bright spots. He fought valiantly but his own muscles and bones were nothing in that iron grip.

The suit injected him with something and he felt his brain slow as a sweet as honey voice drifted through the darkness in his mind.

"Oh Mister Stark," the intruder sang over the radio, "you would do well to appreciate the value of a really vicious lie."

"You hacked Jarvis…" Tony slurred as his face fell against the cool, dark interior HUD screen.

"You Sound surprised, Stark. It's just HumanTech?"

"Tha-s some of the best incription in the world."

"Really?" he laughed, "I expected better, Midgard was progressing so well…".

"Loki?" Tony mumbled as he passed out vaguely aware that his hand was closing around something soft.

* * *

"Sir Stark?" Sif asked, the wind dragging her voice away as they began to fall. But her voice was cut off as a heavy red metallic gauntlet closed around her throat. Iron man's head hung limply to one side, his eyes and the circle upon his chest were both dark, but his hand closed with mechanical strength around her larynx.

She thrashed, dropping her sword into the fuming city, fingers clawing at iron man's hand. She aimed several, well trained blows to the slick metal where his balls and his kidneys should have been, denting the gold polymer alloy but doing little but injure what must be the soft, unconscious body of Tony stark, within the gleaming exoskeleton, which had suddenly and horribly sprung to life, matching her every move as they plummeted through the sky.

She thrashed, using carefully timed and controlled blows and kicks, an ancient, Vaniri fighting style which took centuries to perfect.

And Tony stark was matching it perfectly.

He caught her wrist and met her gaze with the blank grey lights which were normally the suit's eyes.

"That's impossible." Her face fell in confusion, even as the hulk smashed into them, slamming the wind out of her body, meters above the earth.

The beast stank of sweat and adrenaline and rage, it's great rounded shoulder slammed Sif's body into the earth's blacktop.

Her skull hit the pavement with a hollow crack, the full weight of the beast on top of her. The hulk's breath tossed her hair as he bellowed with all his might, inches from her face, covering her with a thin mist of saliva.

Sif snarled and yelled back, just as loudly and with a more pronounced effect coming from her small body.

The hulk blinked stupidly. Met with her fearless, flashing eyes he seemed almost impressed if not afraid. But then, with a triumphant squeak, Sigmund made a bid for freedom.

There was a burst of light and the hulk howled in newfound rage. Snatching one big paw at the wizard's robes and smashing him into an as yet unbroken storefront window. His white legs showed up bright and pale as chicken feet.

Sif rolled away to re-gather her strength. Eying Tony suspiciously, the suit was crushed beyond functionality in many places; it sparked and smoked here and there. Even Stark's expert robotics could not stand up to a really honest hulk smashing. One leg was attempting to bend but without the conation of its master the suit was a clumsy, undirected mess.

Sif raised one hand and called her sword to her hand. But before it responded with its own particular magic, the hulk was once again upon her. He seized her throat, she hooked a leg around his massive, sinuous green knee and they rolled out into the dusty, barren stretch which had once been Rockefeller square. They wrestled in a cruel, bloody jostle of limbs which left Sif with a splotchy painting in green and red blood on her skin. Her nose was flowing freely and her skin shone with perspiration. At last when her sword slammed into her open hand, she was able to make the beast bleed. The hulk was angry and brutish and unyielding, but Sif was the goddess of war.

Somehow Sif managed to pin the beast, one knee in his diaphragm, an elbow digging into his shoulder. In such a brutish contest, her strength easily matched his own.

"Thor told me about you, Banner." She spat blood over his shoulder. Jostling to keep his thrashing limbs in place. The hulk bared his teeth and moaned angrily.

"Shh!" she commanded. Stealing his line of sight, catching those vivid green eyes in the dark pools of her own. "Bruce… that is your name, isn't it… the Berserker."

His thrashing began to still as his heart rate slowed and the transformation back to humanity took over. Sif felt his limbs go slack under her, carefully she moved away from his body.

"Sir Bruce?" Sif crouched, noticing for the first time the ring of dusty pedestrians. Beneath her, Bruce was slowly coming around, frowning up at the sky as he deduced what had happened.

"Did I hurt anyone?" he lifted himself onto one elbow.

"You seem to have damaged the Man of Iron's armor, which is a pity, it was very nice."

"-s he… -s he ok?" Bruce mumbled, but then his eyes focused far past Sif's face, over her shoulder, an expression of confusion on his brow.

"What is i…" she turned, but didn't need to finish her question, as it was promptly answered by the space ship which was descending over Stark Tower.

Natasha slunk back into the shadows, barely breathing, clutching her gun close to her face.

The sound of rough alien feet clanked down the corridor. They hissed and snarled in their own language, arguing, with strings of gurgling phonemes. She peered out from her hiding place and watched as two Chitauri soldiers struggled to drag Thor's unconscious body around the corner.

They clanked right past her without pause. Thor was not bound, unconscious then, and dependably so or he would have been tied up, if any rope could hold him. His hair hung in his face and his hands dangled uselessly in the aliens' grip.

Where were they taking him?

Fearlessly Natasha stepped into the corridor, leveling her gun at the aliens. Feet wide apart she assumed the aura of one twice her strength.

"Put him down." She commanded one finger hovering on the trigger. She saw Clint step around the corner behind him and silently knock an arrow.

The Alien looked down at her, assessing her for a moment.

"Thisss one?" he hissed, grabbing Thor by the hair. He groaned in pain, blinking and trying to stand on knees which were folding awkwardly beneath him.

"Let him go," she cocked her gun, "now."

"naw, that aint going to happen," it smiled with its sideways mouth, saliva clinging between his teeth.

Her eyes dipped to meet Hawkeye's and they came to an accord. The only sounds were the air softened pop of a silenced pistol discharging, and the twang of a bowstring. The brute who was holding Thor by his hair collapsed on top of his prisoner with an arrow in his neck. The other one roared in rage, it took three more bullets to put the beast down.

"Where's the wizard?" Hawkeye asked as he fell to his knees, pushing the Chitauri corpse off his friend.

"The Hulk grabbed him."

Thor pulled himself onto his elbows and coughed weakly onto his forearms.

"Where's Jane?" he asked in a scratchy voice looking up at the sound of descending engines.

He attempted to get up but the ground seemed to slide away beneath him. Natasha held his shoulders, looking up at Clint in distress.

"She stayed behind to try to open the door." the archer explained.

Thor frowned, there was something wrong with this.

"The whole building is crawling with Chitauri." Said Natasha.

"Do you have any idea where they were taking you?"

"Their voices are strange to me, I cannot understand them." Thor shook his head.

"I suspect to the ship they just landed on the roof…"

"What has become of the Man of Iron?" Thor blinked his whole aura dimmed with grief and exhaustion.

"We lost contact with him…" Clint admitted, "I think something was controlling the suit."

"Another puzzle." Natasha knitted her brows.

"You ever feel like you're missing something incredibly obvious…" the ominous silence became suddenly aggressive. The air filled with the sound of clicking mandibles as from every direction doors flew open and crawling, segmented aliens burst out from every door, throwing them back onto their hinges. Thor stood, looking shakier and paler than ever, shoulder to shoulder with Hawkeye, Natasha held her gun pointed blindly in the darkness.

Natasha screamed as something pulled her legs out from under her. Hawkeye felt something rip his bow from his hand and Thor was buried in at least nine alien bodies.

* * *

"I have to help him." Swan was breathing fast and panicked. Her fingers scrabbled at the rubble all around them. She shifted her weight so that the I beam was propped across her wings.

"You said we couldn't climb out." Steve blinked away the cascading dust from his eyes.

"I said _we_ not I." she looked down at him.

"I see." Steve touched his leg, he could feel the deformation of broken bones in his shin.

"I can't choose you over Thor." She stated plainly, "if you want to come with me it's going to hurt."

"Fine." Steve grit his teeth.

"It's fine?"

"Go! Do it! Now."

With a snarl of exertion Swan forced her legs to straighten. Steve gasped in pain as the rocks which had pinned his lower body in place shifted. Slowly the I beam moved so that, along its length, a shaft of clear sunlight broke through.

"I can get us out." Swan looked up into the light, her face was smeared with dirt and sweat.

"You sure?" Steve gasped there were tears in his eyes.

"Take my hand." She grabbed the Captain by the wrist. Steve grabbed at his shield and held it above their faces. Pulling him close to her chest, Swan tucked her wings around them. He could feel her breathing on his neck she smelled like heaven. Swan's hands clutched wads of red flannel. With a surge of Asgardian strength she threw herself forward into that desperately thin beam of light.

Steve grabbed at the lip of her breastplate as they were thrown forward. The rocks and the dust filtered down into his clothing. Everything was shifting, falling, breaking apart again; he swooned in pain as the steel girder shifted onto his ankle. Distantly he could feel the Valkyrie's hands adjust their grip across his back. His head fell into her breast.

"Come on…" she gasped, swearing in Asgardian. She pulled Steve up to her chest and with a snarling yell and a burst of magic and strength she broke through into broad, welcoming daylight.

Like a bullet, they shot up into the air, Swan's wings unfurling in a cloud of dust. However they did not stay airborne for more than a moment. There was one, two pumps, and then the Valkyrie's strength failed her. She had only a second to flinch away from the oncoming blacktop.

They hit the ground with a clash of metal, and did not arise from where they fell. In seconds the pair of them were swarmed by emergency workers. Swan's wings faded as they grabbed to pull them apart. Swan groaned in pain, taking deep, profligate lungfuls of air rolling onto her back away from Steve.

She sat up stiffly, staring down the avenue; slowly a smile crept onto her face, for way far away downtown a green speck was growing larger and larger. The hulk bellowed joyfully as it ran on all fours in great leaps toward Stark tower.

Swan got to her feet, new energy returning to her limbs. her helm was gone, her wings were broken. She was bleeding from the mouth and her hair was matted with cement dust. She was beaten and broken and as tired as she had ever been. But she was a Valkyrie.

Swan clung tight to the Hulk's back. Sif was squealing in delight as he leapt over the cars and busses and heaps of rubble. When they reached Stark tower he crouched low, took a few loping strides and threw himself up the side of the building. His great simian limbs arched out, hands like iron claws bit into the edges of empty windows, clawing through the architecture, pulling them swiftly up the tower.

"Here!" Swan yelled as they approached the shattered window to the lab where, only minutes prior, Thor had been imprisoned. She slid down from the Hulk's great green shoulder. The wind sent bits of paper scattered around the floor of the little room into whirlwinds. The door to the testing chamber was thrown wide and inside it was eerily dark and silent.

The two women went to the door, Swan stopped, nearly stubbing her toe on Mjolnir, Sif brushed past her. She walked a few paces into the darkness and then, running forward the Warrior goddess screamed in rage and grief.

"No!" She grabbed the hospital scrubs which Loki was wearing at the collar, desperately shaking him and getting no response. Loki's head lulled back on severed neck muscles, blood trickled from the corner of his mouth to make a black path across his dark purple cheek. His dark hair, heavy with blood stuck to his brow. The bare slits of his eyes were red and dry and translucent as ruby.

"No! no no no!" her pleas dissolved into sobs. She struck Loki upon the chest.

"Sif."

She screamed in blind, Asgardian rage, throwing a wild punch and shattering the flat-lining echocardiogram.

Swan looked on holding her breath.

"Sif?" she asked, approaching the other woman carefully.

"Sif!"

The goddess looked up, her face was streaked with dirt and blood and tears.

"We have to find Thor." Swan caught a familiar angle in Loki's dark profile and her voice caught in her throat. There was nothing she could do for him in death, the soul of a Jotun did not burn, for him there was no bright, distant star to return to.

Sif lifted her ponderous limbs from the ground. Taking up her sword she narrowed her eyes. She reeked of vengeance. Without a word to Swan, she brushed past her into the room beyond. She bore her blade, naked in one hand, it would not be sheathed until it had drunk it's fill upon the blood of her enemies.

Swan picked up Mjolnir and followed her.

Jane had parted from the others when it looked as if there was going to be killing. She knew for a fact that Stark tower had automated defenses, and that they weren't working, and that she could be of more use trying to get them back online than by playing human damsel in distress for a bunch of wayward Asgardians. She had skills, important skills, skills which could benefit Earth and help to defeat her enemies. She knew that getting herself captured by Chitauri to be used as a bargaining tool against Thor sounded unpleasant, so she kept her head down, retreating down into the depths of the building, away from danger.

Silently she crept down the windowless interior corridor. Emergency lights played off the ceiling tiles. Offices branched off to the left and right, a vase of flowers stood ominously upon an end table near the elevators, casting its amoeboid shadow on the wall.

She was looking for the server room. SOMETHING had affected Jarvis, they had heard the exchange with Tony in the Quinjet, something had turned off the automated defenses and something had made the door to the Testing chamber slam shut at exactly the right moment to trap Thor inside. Whatever that something was, it was affecting all the systems in the building.

DING the elevator chimed merrily, a door opened, pouring light into the murky lobby.

Jane hastily hid herself behind a pillar, trying to remain completely still as the sound of booted feet approached.

She held her hands over her mouth to silence her breathing. What she saw was impossible.

The man stopped in the hallway, immediately outside of Jane's hiding spot. He was pale and spidery in the darkness, the shifting; yellow emergency lights sparkled on his armor, throwing his face into colorless chiaroscuro.

"So it's you my brother reeks of." He said without turning to acknowledge her. His voice was smooth and hypnotic. He swept his gaze over the shadows in which Jane suddenly felt so poorly hidden. "Come out now." Loki smiled a villainous smile, "I won't hurt you."

"You're dead." Jane slunk forward until she stood with her back against the pillar.

"You're mortal."

"Thor thinks you're dead." She felt her voice rise with trembling emotion.

"Thinking isn't really his area." Loki sneered.

Jane frowned by way of protest. "He thinks youre dead Loki!"

"and that's the way it should be! Where are you off to?" Loki asked her, narrowing his eyes.

"Server room." She answered, only now realizing how silly that sounded.

"The server room," he barked in laughter, "is the WiFi down again?"

"I wanted to figure out why the-the," Loki leaned an elbow next to her head looking down at her sternly, "why the automated defenses weren't turning on."

"In a skyscraper full of bloodthirsty aliens?"

"Yes." She whispered apologetically.

"I can see why Thor likes you." Loki looked around nervously.

"And where are YOU going?" Jane demanded of him.

"I…" Loki glanced back at the sound of tramping clawed feet, "Come along!" he snatched her wrist and dragged her down the corridor. They turned a corner into daylight, Loki pulled her close to him in the alcove in front of an office door. She could hear the Chitauri approaching, shouting in their rough voices. Loki fiddled with the electronic locking mechanism for a second and at the last possible moment before they were discovered, he pulled Jane through into darkness. She saw the shadows of passing feet cut through the light under the door, and move steadily onward.

"Where are we?" she asked, straining to focus in the gloom.

"Server room." He stalked away into the darkness. A Stark industries laptop sat upon a small desk, bathed in the light of it's own arc reactor power source. Loki folded himself into the swiveling desk chair, tapping the keyboard impatiently.

"So… youre not dead."

"no." he pecked out a line of code into the computer.

"how'd you manage that?"

"you wouldn't understand."

"try me!"

"You cannot understand, you will never undrstand," he spun the chair to face her, "your'e human, your'e insignificant, you are ants to us and you will never be more than a transient pet to my brother, you are a temporary amusement, you mean NOTHING to him!"

There was a tense moment in which they could hear nothing but the hum of computers in the darkness.

"Please help." Jane sniffed in frustration, "They took him, they took Thor!"

"I know." He answered, his aspect softening, changing radically from just a minute earlier. "I opened the door."

"You what?"

"I used the network to remotely open the door to the testing chamber, allowing the Chitauri to take my brother."

"Loki." Jane's face screwed up, "They'll kill him." Her voice broke.

"We made a bargain. After I split myself, as I lay dying I saw him inside my head… I saw his plans, saw what her was turning me into." Loki explained, the soft blue light of the computer screen making his eyelashes splay across his cheeks. "So we made a bargain, Thanos and I… he got Thor, I got Earth."

"And what will happen to him?"

"His body will be destroyed and all that fire and lightning and rage will be stuffed into a little box. To be used at the discretion of its master."

Jane felt hot tears behind her eyes, "so you mean to conquer us?"

"I mean to hide, this world is very large, and I have many disguises." He looked far away into the shadows, "he has my knowledge, everything I ever knew, he has them and he can use them."

"And you just handed him one of the most powerful weapons in the galaxy!"

"Which he will not use against this world." Loki's eyes were bright with emotion which Jane did not expect. "For Earth to be safe by brother must die."

"No!" she snapped and ran for the door, the lock clicked as she approached. She groaned in frustration. "Open it!" she shook the handle but it wouldn't budge, "Please, help me Loki."

She slid to the ground crying and clutching the doorknob.

"He held you," she said in a whisper, "you were all… purple, and alien… but you were his brother, and he just... How many times has his heart been broken?"

Loki was watching her, frowning. Slowly he closed the computer. "Is the life of a God worth more than the lives of all those who worship him?" he asked.

The hulk tossed Sif wildly across the front of the skyscraper. Chitauri fighters caught the updraft along the tower's flank. They met in midair and the Goddess' momentum threw him into the side of the building shattering glass raining down all around them. With a shove and a kick she unseated him. Grabbing his blaster and sending a white hot beam of plasma down after him as he fell. Her sword flashed in great arcs of white, hewing the bodies of her enemies in midair.

The beast roared and crashed along the outside of the windows. Here and there he snatched a hovering alien out of the sky, their stinging energy bolts only served to enrage him further.

Swan struggled up the interior stairs. She leaned against the cold painted steel railing, dropping Mjolnir and gasping for breath. She looked up, only two more stories. Sweat ran down her face and between her breasts. She regretted the loss of her wings, although hidden from view, they still pained her considerably and made her feel weak and handicapped without them.

Far below the clang of an opening door alerted her to the approach of her enemies. Swan leaned over the railing, looking down, down the spiraling stair to see a great host of Chitauri coming towards her.

She wrapped the leather strap around her wrist and with a great puff of air, she lifted it.

"Come on!" she cursed quietly at the hammer. In a burst of strength she mounted the next five stairs, stopped to take three deep breaths and made it up the next flight. She glanced down the stairwell again. Her enemies had not slackened their pace; in fact, with a horrible racket they were gaining on her.

Swan desperately looked around for a hiding place but none availed itself. She dashed up the last flight of stairs that opened onto the roof and threw herself at the door. It held fast.

Outside, through the little window she could see a whole gathering of Aliens. The God of thunder was dragged forward into their midst and thrown onto the ground, he didn't get up.

The ship sank through the murky atmosphere like a rock falling through water. It's great, formless belly lowered heavily over Manhattan; blocking out the light of the sun, engines straining and whining against the downward pull of gravity.

A small aperture opened in the ship's rough, segmented flank, from which a platform descended and upon the platform stood an alien. He was dark and strange and threatening in his billowing robes. Loki called him The Other, but no further appellation availed itself.

He stood there dark as a standing stone, stooped low by Earth's gravity, but he was no less threatening in the broad light of the sun than in the eternal night of space. His mandibles worked wetly and his golden face mask glittered.

Chitauri scouts zoomed like bees around the tower, angrily cutting through the smoggy air. The Other stepped down onto the balcony, his soldiers scurried all around him.

"Bring me the Prince of Asgard." He demanded. Patiently he surveyed the smoldering landscape.

In a moment a great host of alien troops appeared on the roof. They hemmed and hawed unpleasantly, dragging three prisoners between them. The two largest stepped forward and threw the God of thunder onto the floor where he lay unmoving.

"The last son of Odin." The Other hissed. He placed one boot upon Thor's shoulder rolling him onto his back. "hubris." He moved the boot to Thor's windpipe, his icy blue eyes opened a slit then closed in exhaustion. "that's your downfall."

"Yes. he's worth a thousand Earths." Jane said to Loki. He sighed, looked at the computer screen and struck a single key.

"Don't tell him I'm alive."

"Why not?"

"On my home world I am a pariah, I am a blemish upon the house of Odin, if I return to Asgard it is to be returned to powerlessness, to weakness."

"You're gonna run?"

"Yes."

"If you help him, I won't stop you."

Loki looked down at her, "this is on your shoulders now."

Swan watched through the window as the alien touched him. One filthy boot pressed into his throat, rage burned inside her. Growling in frustration she threw herself at the door, slamming her shoulder into it, shaking it on its hinges.

She only remembered the approaching Chitauri when one of their energy bolts hit the doorframe above her. She spun around, hacking through two of them and kicking a third down the stairs with a yell, he landed on top of his companions, falling head over heels down to the landing.

There was a barely audible click.

Swan spun herself around, grabbed Mjolnir and slammed her shoulder into the door. It gave easily, allowing her to break through into the broad daylight. There were some three dozen aliens standing in ordered ranks around the edge of the landing pad. But they were not looking at her. The Other bent low over the Thunderer's body, his full weight behind cruelly knotted talons. Thor was struggling weakly, fingers grabbing at the alien's hands. There was a look of mortal terror in his blue eyes, his mouth opened but no sound came out.

"Thor!" Swan yelled, instantly attracting the attention of everyone present. He opened his eyes weakly; one hand fell limp onto the ground. She threw the hammer with all her might, hoping desperately that he still had the strength to wield the weapon. She released it from her hand just as a Chitauri warrior barreled out of the stairwell and into her from behind. She was slammed into the ground with enough force to knock the air from her lungs, the full weight of the alien pinning her. He smelled filthy, like rot and soot and sweat.

"pretty." He hissed in a voice like a steam engine, pulling her hair back and groping at her waist. She kicked him hard in the stomach, rolled onto her back, grappling viciously with his razor sharp talons. He grabbed her armor and slammed her whole body against the ground, over and over again. Striking at her face and cracking her skull on the paving stones.

Distantly she heard a cry of rage. Something knocked the alien off her. Something flew over her head, landing with a bellow amidst the Chitauri.

Thunder rolled in the distance.

Slowly, ears ringing and vision blurring, she forced herself to roll over. Swan spat a mouthful of blood onto the ground, her nose felt broken. The Hulk was throwing aliens off the roof to his left and right. Sif's sword flashed and gleamed as it hew the bodies of her enemies.

Thor was on his feet, the Other lying on the ground before him. Mjolnir hung heavy in his hand. His hair lifted with static electricity. The sky darkened very suddenly and his face seemed to fall, there was no pleasure in this battle, there was no hope in victory.

"Did you kill him?" the thunder god asked, he was very calm. Deeply scratched lines in his face showed the desperate scars which the millennia brought. His hair blew into his mouth and his eyes softened. He was heartbroken.

The Other tried to scamper away from the god's swift vengeance, but Thor grabbed the gold facemask, electricity flickering between his bared teeth. "Did you touch him?" Thor studied the alien's face carefully.

"no." the Other pronounced slowly, "we were making him into a bomb, someone stopped us."

"Liar." He brought the hammer back behind his head.

"NO!" the alien shrieked in fear. "I swear."

Thor threw him aside. He dropped to one knee in exhaustion. The Other rolled, and came to a stop near where the Valkyrie was slowly recovering.

He caught some strange movement out of the corner of his eye. Thor looked up to see Jane's face peering out of the window of Tony's apartment. He was suddenly overwhelmed with a feeling of protectiveness, she should not have come.

Swan put her weight on shaky elbows, thick drops of red slowly oozing from her nose and mouth. she coughed weakly and spat more blood onto the ground.

The Other saw her, scampered backwards and drew a small, shining silver energy weapon from his pocket. He trained the weapon on her. He lifting Mjolnir high over his head and a great white arc of plasma flashed down from the sky, leaping from surface to surface, sparking down the lightning rods. It spread and crackled, bursting in the Chitauri armor and sizzling its way through their commander's body, making it burst and smolder.

When the lightning hit the spaceship it blackened the hull, electromagnetism causing all the ship's computers to short out at the same instant. With a tired groan it tipped and fell from the sky, dragging a trail of smoke behind it, and crashing in a blinding fireball into the street far below.

Thor made eye contact with Swan, breathing slowly and blinking. He smiled, took one step forward and his eyes suddenly lost their focus, he swayed slightly, putting out a hand to catch himself on something which wasn't there, and collapsed. His head cracked against the ground and the hammer cracked the paver it landed on. His hands folded up quietly in front of his chest. His head lolled to the side, mouth slightly open.

With a look of fear Swan got up and went to him. The chitauri were gone and a blanket of sudden silence fell over the world. A distant siren screamed through the dusty city. she fell down by his head.

"Asa?" she asked lying one hand on his shoulder, "Asa!" but there was no response. Carefully she pushed him onto his back. Groping at his neck. Her breath was coming in panicked gasps, his wasn't coming at all.

"Thor, come on!" she rubbed her palms together, generating energy between them which she pushed into his chest. "I don't want to do this." She leaned over him, sealing her mouth to his, forcing air into his lungs. Another burst of magic, and she could see Jane foster running up to her. Another breath and Sif and the Hulk appeared in her peripheral.

"Come on!" she shouted, light and energy sparkling from her hands. She knew it was hopeless, she should be starting the death ritual already, Fenric toxicity was fatal.

She could feel heat in her eyes, and something running down her cheeks which wasn't blood.

With a rough, broken rattle the god of thunder gasped for breath and the Valkyrie collapsed on top of him in tears. He gulped desperately at the air, grabbing for anything within reach which happened to be swan. Jane knelt down beside her, running one hand through his hair. His eyes flickered, focusing on her, he smiled weakly and closed his eyes again. Bruce was recovering with Sif's arm around his ribs. It was quiet, so quiet in their little rooftop bubble away from the horrors of the world.

"Why does it have a cookie on it?" Thor asked poking at the wiggly lump which the humans swore was food.

"It's Tiramisu, it's good." Jane insisted. The café was crowded and the outside seating was bathed in afternoon light. Gingerly he held the little desert fork in one big hand, scraping at the cinnamon topping. He took a mouthful of cake, chewing thoughtfully.

"See!" she gestured with both hands, "it's delicious." To this Thor only shrugged. For the thousandth time Jane looked at him and desperately wanted to tell him what she knew, Loki was alive. She opened her mouth, thought of her promise, and only smiled. His murder would remain a mystery.

"I miss your old smile." She admitted it was true; the first time he had lost his brother it had shattered him. Now there was nothing to put back together. He was a very fragile being.

He was about to respond to her when something caught his eye. At the bar, across the narrow city street, a man in a finely tailored suit stepped out the door. He wore a fedora and mirrored sunglasses. For a moment his eyes might have fixed on him. He may have touched the brim of his hat in greeting or in farewell.

Jane watched him carefully. She heard a scrape of chair legs over sidewalk and turned back to see that Thor had gotten up.

He crossed the street, making a car stop suddenly and beep its horn. He put up a hand to apologize to the driver and when he looked up the stranger was gone.

Loki pulled his collar around his ears shifting the hat down over his eyes and stalking away into the morning crowd. All around him the city was healing; cleanup crews and scaffolding had appeared everywhere, the shops and restraints re opened. And for all anyone knew, Loki Laufeyson was dead.


End file.
